Litecoin Network Difficulty

Litecoin difficulty and the Scrypt algorithm

Litecoin runs on Scrypt, a hash function chosen for being memory-hard so that mining would stay accessible to ordinary CPUs at launch. Today the network is secured by dedicated Scrypt ASICs, and Litecoin difficulty tells you how much of their work goes into a single block.

The network launched in October 2011 with a very low starting difficulty of about 0.000244, so for the first few days it was below one. The scale works the same way as Bitcoin's, but the hashes are different, so LTC and BTC difficulty numbers can't be compared directly; only the trends can.

A 3.5-day epoch: four adjustments per Bitcoin epoch

Like Bitcoin, Litecoin adjusts difficulty every 2016 blocks, but its blocks come every 2.5 minutes on average. A planned epoch therefore lasts about 3.5 days, and there are roughly four LTC adjustments for every Bitcoin one. The network responds faster both to new ASICs coming online and to machines switching off.

The cap is the same: no more than a factor of four up or down per adjustment. The change takes effect at the block whose height is divisible by 2016. The forecast at the top of the page appears after 144 blocks, about 6 hours after an adjustment, and sharpens with every block after that.

The short epoch has a flip side: the forecast is less stable. A single large farm joining or leaving within 3.5 days noticeably shifts the average block time, so the expected change can move from hour to hour. On the other hand, any overshoot corrects itself quickly, since the next adjustment is days away rather than two weeks.

Protection against the time-warp attack

In Bitcoin, consecutive epochs don't overlap: an epoch is measured from its first block to its last. That leaves a theoretical loophole called time-warp, where a miner with majority hashrate manipulates timestamps at epoch boundaries to push difficulty down again and again.

Litecoin closed it long ago with a fix associated with the developer ArtForz: the epoch is measured over a full 2016 intervals starting from the last block of the previous epoch, so neighbouring epochs share a block. Our forecast uses exactly this rule, so it matches what a Litecoin node will calculate.

Merged mining with Dogecoin supports LTC hashrate

Since 2014, Scrypt miners have been able to mine Dogecoin at the same time through merged mining: the same work counts on both networks. The extra DOGE makes mining Litecoin more rewarding than it would be on its own, which is a meaningful support for the network's hashrate and therefore for LTC difficulty.

The two difficulties are still independent: Litecoin uses 2016-block epochs, while Dogecoin adjusts at every block. On RuPool, a Scrypt ASIC connects to the LTC stratum and earns both coins; there is no separate DOGE stratum.

What LTC difficulty means for a Scrypt ASIC's income

At a constant hashrate, litecoin income falls in proportion to rising difficulty. For a Scrypt ASIC owner that is only part of the picture: the other part, DOGE, depends on Dogecoin's own difficulty and price. So it pays to watch both networks rather than LTC alone.

RuPool pays with the FPPS scheme and a 1% fee, separately for each coin. The profitability calculator estimates what a specific ASIC earns at current difficulty.