user12542: My friend and I have been discussing trying to mine Bitcoins or an altcoin. We've come to the conclusion that at the current difficulty one gigahash per second Litecoin mining will net ~$5 USD a day. Now, there are some low-end Bitcoin ASICs out there (such as ASICMiner Block Erupters which get 333 MH/s) that would literally take years with the current Bitcoin difficulty to regain the cost of the machine mining Bitcoin. Would it be possible to configure an ASIC of this type to mine Litecoin? Would the hardware be capable of supporting that?

user92132: No. The hardware would be ineffective, as it is designed to only calculate sha256. Try a different sha256 coin and convert it to Litecoin.

user11369: Nope, ASIC implies a physically designed chip only meant for doing 1 thing. And bitcoin ASICs are only capable of SHA hashing while litecoin demands scrypt hashing.

12542: <p>My friend and I have been discussing trying to mine Bitcoins or an altcoin. We've come to the conclusion that at the current difficulty one gigahash per second Litecoin mining will net ~$5 USD a day. Now, there are some low-end Bitcoin ASICs out there (such as ASICMiner Block Erupters which get 333 MH/s) that would literally take years with the current Bitcoin difficulty to regain the cost of the machine mining Bitcoin. Would it be possible to configure an ASIC of this type to mine <em>Litecoin</em>? Would the hardware be capable of supporting that?</p>
 92132: <p>No. The hardware would be ineffective, as it is designed to only calculate sha256. Try a different sha256 coin and convert it to Litecoin.</p>
 11369: <p>Nope, ASIC implies a physically designed chip only meant for doing 1 thing. And bitcoin ASICs are only capable of SHA hashing while litecoin demands scrypt hashing.</p>
