LitecoinPool

LitecoinPool.org was started shortly after the birth of Litecoin by Pooler, who is well known in the community as a member of the Litecoin core development team and for being the maintainer of the cpuminer software package. Since the very start, the pool used ad-hoc software: Pooler wrote the front end entirely from scratch, with security and efficiency in mind, while the mining back end was originally a heavily-modified version of Jeff Garzik's pushpool. After two weeks of intensive testing, on November 5, 2011 the pool opened its doors to the public, becoming the first PPS pool for Litecoin. In April 2012 LitecoinPool.org also became the first pool to support variable-difficulty shares, a technique later dubbed “vardiff” by Bitcoin pools, allowing miners to drastically reduce their network bandwidth usage. Thanks to its advanced features and its reliability, the pool quickly attracted a very high number of miners, to the point that during the first half of 2012 it often constituted over 40% of the entire Litecoin network. Due to centralization concerns, it was decided to temporarily close new registrations; later in 2012, registrations were reopened, but have since been subject to approval. In August 2013 the back-end software was completely redesigned and rewritten from scratch to implement advanced efficiency and scalability optimizations that Pooler devised after implementing support for the Stratum protocol in cpuminer. This new implementation makes LitecoinPool.org the first Litecoin pool based entirely on software written from scratch, and the first pool to implement extensions to the Stratum protocol such as “resume”, “suggest_difficulty” and “suggest_target”. In September 2014 LitecoinPool.org also became the first Litecoin pool to offer secure mining over TLS-encrypted Stratum connections, protecting miners from potential man-in-the-middle attacks.