I started looking into mining LiteCoin. I'm not too sure that it will be profitable, but I thought I'd give a shot with an old computer that goes completely unused. I installed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (long term support) because Windows XP is not going to be supported by Microsoft after April 8, 2014. I downloaded the LiteCoin wallet and the bootlogger quick sync file. The syncing was only supposed to take an hour, but it took about four. Good start. Guess that's what I get for using a 10 year old computer. Anyschmows, I still have to download a mining program (pooler's cpuminer) and join a mining pool. I could go it alone, but it's practically impossible to get any coins by yourself. An analogy to the way LiteCoin (and BitCoin and all other altcoins) are mined is everyone is throwing darts trying to hit the LiteCoin and whoever hits it, wins. So my slow computer is a tiny dart and fast computers are machine guns. So, to distribute the effort and end up with a partial coin instead of nothing, pools were formed and the more computing power you contribute to the pool, the larger of a percentage of the LiteCoin you'll get when your pool wins. Kind of like a lottery pool.
Interestingly, mining is what keeps the network safe, as the math that your computer is doing is checking the validity chain of other people's transactions. Neat stuff.
