Bitcoin Forum

As the title says. But how much gigahash would you believe is needed to effectively solo mine if its even feasible? 50+ 100+?
I can't help but think Solo mining might be the way to go at first. Just looking for peoples opinions is all :)

Considering that the ASICs are going to be shipped in bulk you probably have only one difficulty change before it becomes less profitable. It also depends on when during the 2016 blocks the deliveries show up as well.
The only reason to solo would be to get one of the early 25BTC blocks but the competition will be fierce.

Personally I would just go with a pool that has stratum.

Solo mining may also be too risky and you may miss your window. Say you start solo mining the 1st week ASICs hit but are unlucky and do not find many/any blocks. Then more people start to get them and difficulty skyrockets. I guess it all depends if you want to take that risk or not, because on the other hand you may be lucky and hit the jackpot before difficulty skyrockets. I personally am sticking to pool mining with stratum because every time I go to Las Vegas I lose all my money  ;D

Also depends on how many ASICs you receive. 60Ghash is a lot of power, but still relatively weak compared to the network. If you picked up 1.5THash, then you're suddenly in a diff boat.

I think it makes way more sense to just stick to a pool. There is no way you get your equipment early enough to risk going solo. And even if you did I still think it's a better bet to stick with a pool you are comfortable with.

I think Pool mining makes more sense the more hash power you have because you take out luck out of the equation. Example: if you have half of the hashing power of the network, you'll almost get half of the bitcoins generated if you mine using pools (minus the ones going to the "lucky solo miners"). If solo mining, and with a bad luck, you can get 0 bitcoins ... So, feeling lucky ... punk? :D

That makes absolutely no sense

It does make sense. In a pool you are 'almost' guaranteed coins which is why people mine on them. With solo mining there is no guarantee, ever. its all luck. Granted, with half the network hashrate at your disposal your luck would be much better, but its still luck.

Tell me by what method it is you (and bobitza) believe that Pools grant coins to people? Even a PPS pool relies on finding blocks to fund the coins which they disperse to their users. The more hashing power you have, the less sense it makes to mine on a pool, as the point of a pool is solely to reduce variance (by the very property of increasing proportional hash rate!), at the cost of fees and sharing the rewards for blocks found with others in the pool.

If you had the hypothetical 50% of the network hashing power, not only does mining on a pool grant whatever pool you are on > 51% power, which is bad, but unless the pool already contributes significant (another appreciable chunk of total network hashing) power on top of your own, you are essentially still mining solo except that you are paying pool fees, and distributing part of the reward that you are almost guaranteed to be finding, to others for no appreciable reason.

I don't think people really understand mining sometimes.

As a miner on a PPS pool, I could careless if the pool EVER finds a block. The pool operator has stated they will give me X for every share submitted. if they never find a block then they better be buying coins to pay me. Is this likely to happen? No, but thats not the point.


This is very true and I had not thought about it that way.

^^^ This.


The 50% number was just an example, I could have used 10%, 1% or 0.001%.

Use this calculator http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/old_calculator.php input current difficulty and hashrate. It will need to be converted from giga and megahashes to in kilohashes per second.

Definitely POOL mining, probably slush not decided yet... but I'll not give it up on chance with this.

Well, it is somewhat the point, if the pool never found a block, you would quickly bankrupt the pool owner. If the pool owner lacks funds for payout, you would lose whatever mining time you dedicated before hopping. The more mining power you have on tap, the greater the loss to any time lacking payment, to return to the original point. That is however a subsidiary part of the discussion, I merely meant to point out that a pool is no more a guarantee of payment than solo mining, in that they require the luck of the coins to be able to payout as much as anyone else.


The fact that you think 50% is the same as .001% is exactly why I said that it sounds like you do not understand mining.


+1 to this. I quite enjoyed this calculator, and it gives you a very good sense of how risky soloing will be based on your proportion of the network.

How is this thread different to https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=120214.0 ?

It doesn't have a poll on top? I dunno. I give up. How is this thread different to https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=120214.0 ?

The fact that you just like to pick on words/numbers and take them out of context makes you a troll.

@con Same thread different title.. People do not know about Google search yet.

@bobitza  Thanks. My first morning laugh.

Don't be asinine. I have clear and useful discussions with everyone but you, but for some reason you're special enough for me to troll? Perhaps the simpler and more logical explanation is that I am correct and you do not have an understanding of things you are espousing an opinion on, and therefore bring no argument/fact/logic to the table, and thus there can be no discourse?  ::)

I also have normal discussions on a wide range of topics with the rest of the forum except you.

When your response is:

... you sound condescending and trying to be a smart arse. Had you started with "In my opinion I think it's better to mine solo because a) b) c) ..." I wouldn't have considered you a troll. I mean look at your previous answer. Get the fvck down from your high horses. Show us you're just as good at argumenting "for" because you showed us you're pretty good at argumenting "against". That's easy.

Given that p2pool is doing very nicely with 300-400GH/s (110% PPS for the last 90 days), was handling variable difficulty from the start and recently used it for the miners in addition to its own protocol and pays the tx fees automatically it seems more than ready for ASICs.
So p2pool for me as a way to reduce variance vs solo mining without any of the usual pool drawbacks (fees, downtimes).

Here's the thing, regardless of whether you feel personally slighted, you've not approached this at all properly.

You believe that I am suggesting people should mine solo, but... I don't suggest that at all. I merely suggest your statement was preposterous, because it was. In my opinion, you made the argument, so you should back it up (which you in this entire thread, have not done).

If you really think I should have to give reasons why your baseless statement is baseless, I can do that, and then we can argue and argue and argue (if you present counter-reasoning).

Quoted in entirety so that no context is removed:

I will ignore numbers since you feel I nitpick them too much. What remains is the statement which I will paraphrase, 'pool mining makes more sense the more hash power you have because you take out luck.'
Let's look at 4 distinct scenarios:
.1%, 1%, 10%, 100%.
.1%, finding a block will take on average 7 days (21 days for 95% probability to find a block)
1% finding a block on average 17hours (2 days 2hrs for 95%)
10% avg 1.75 hours (5hours 95%)
100% avg 10minutes (95% 30mins, but you get all the blocks anyway, so it doesn't matter).

Now these numbers are for total hashrate moving 6 blocks/hr. The "flat" rate so to speak. You can already see that the more hashing power you have, the less likely it is that no matter how unlucky you are, that you will get "0" coins, not that it would matter, as the difficulty would remain flat.

So what about for network rate far above difficulty? As that's the scenario we are thinking about, that's a fair question. If the network were moving 12blocks/hr we get a simple halving of the above numbers. 24blocks/hr, 4x. All things are in proportion (the time to difficulty change is halved when your time to find a block is halved).

So, going back to our original numbers, assuming you were incredibly unlucky, and went to 95% every time (this is really very very unlikely to happen repeatedly, but for the sake of argument)...
100% Hashrate finds 2016 blocks (all of them)
10% hashrate finds 67 blocks (3 1/3rd% of all blocks)
1% finds 6.75 blocks (rounded down to 6, .3%)
.1% finds 0 blocks.

The more hashrate you have, the better you are doing while solo mining, even in the scenario of an incredibly unlikely string of awful bad luck (you can argue for one block going beyond 95% probability, and entering even the most extreme scenario, even 1% is almost guaranteed to find at least 1 block before change). This is the opposite of your statement, even giving you the benefit of the doubt for someone with the most improbable of bad luck.

Let's look at pool mining, the most favorable and least variable method is PPS, this typically carries a 5% pool fee (p2pool is an exception, but I'm not sure how long they will keep up their system as-is), so then how would this compare to pool mining. Here I will look at average rates rather than worst case scenario. Let's say your pool collectively owns 100% of the hashing power, and you own X% of that pools power, for ease of calculation. Solo vs. pool payout

100% hashrate: 2016 blocks vs 1915 blocks (this would actually be paid in coins, but I don't want #s to get too big)
10% hashrate: 192 blocks vs 191
1% hashrate: 19 blocks vs 19
.1% hashrate: 1 block vs 2blocks

Again as you increase in personal power, fees begin to take more of a toll.

All very simple calculations, but I don't believe you need to get overly fancy here. The opposite of your statement is true, the more hashing power you have, the better off you are mining solo, if you do not feel that you are the unluckiest person on earth.

So my original advice stands, in my opinion from the numbers above it seems that if you are low on the hashing power totem pole comparatively, I'd suggest going with a pool (and not a PPS, but that's personal preference), as you increase your personal stake, the better off you might be on your own, if you are ok with a little risk.

I feel I've met all your criteria in this post. I didn't pick on your numbers, I ignored them completely, I gave a (hopefully) non-condescending list of calculated reasons why your statement was incorrect, and gave a reasoned statement of what I think is the most rational course for people to follow based on their circumstances.

The reason I didn't do this in the first place is that it seemed obvious, and I've now written about 20x the length of your posts to do so. Hardly fair that I'm the troll unless this is done.

_{An interesting side note, that relates to the point I discussed with AMDD. Recalculating PPS pool above, assuming the pool has 20% of total network hashing power, and you have 10% (or 50% of the pool)
On average the pool will find 384 blocks, 192 of those will be blocks found by you. The share calculations are their own beast, but working with average times, it should take an "average" number of shares to find blocks in that difficulty window, so if you assume 50% of 95% total paid out to you, that is 182.4 Blocks you earn, out of 192 you found. Yuck. But one pays for security, as should be obvious.}

After reading all this, I think Ill just stick to Pool mining then :)