Bitcoin Forum

Everything that I have read recently has pointed me to the fact that solo mining is not profitable. I have a unique situation where my electricity is included and I pay nothing for it. It does not matter how much I do or do not use. Would it still be profitable or would I still be unable to reach ROI on one or two ASIC miners?

what will happen is you will mine, and get nothing.  Maybe you are really lucky, and get a block.  But just roughly calculate what your power is vs power of everyone to get an idea of your odds. :P  good luck.  if you do solo mine for fun point your rig at solo.ckpool

Solo mining is like playing a lottery. You either get the entire reward or nothing at all. When you have free power this can be good because you're not paying for any power if you don't find a block, if you do find a block you get a little over 25 BTC. Or you can mine to a pool with PPS or some similar system and get smaller amounts of BTC, depending on the equipment a few dollars a day, with 1TH would be about 0.007637 BTC.

Do you want to test your luck and make thousands at once or go the safe route and make a small amount per day?

It would be greatly profitable to do this, this way for a hobby, but, you are not guarenteed to get anything.

I would recommend that you create a private pool for yourself of something like a Raspberry Pi or an old Computer that can connect to the internet but probably doesn't need a high CPU avaliability. Then connect a few ASIC miners such as 4 x antminer s5's and connect them to your new pool, leave this running and see what rewards you get for it!

(note: you may get nothing, but, it is likely you will get a few blocks in a few weeks and may earn more than being on a pool and don't have to pay reward fees of 1%!)

NOTE: If you are in an apartment or similar, you may be able to get some of your neighbours to get cheap mining equipment and join your private pool but then you will have to split the profits evenly.

I was looking at buying two antminer S7's and starting from there. Would just using them in a pool be a better option?

It depends I guess.  In a pool maybe you will ROI, solo maybe in 1 year you will find 1 block.  so lets say you get 10 to 15 btc in a pool, or a chance to get 25btc or nothing.  dont forget the halving. maybe someone has real numbers.

i would try with 1 s3 or s5 if you have cheap electricity and a low budget, but the waiting can really kill you, we are talking about 32 months of waiting for the s5 for example if the diff do not increase

it must be said that with the halving it will be easy to do solo, unless the diff does not double

I have a 336mhs block erupter solo mining...hahahahaha its only on when i'm using my computer.  I calculate I have a change every 12 seconds to be 1 in over 150 billion or something.


So is it useless ?  yes.  Why do I do it ?  no idea.  But it costs me nothing to do it, and the reward is marginally 0.0000000000000001% more than zero, so I've got that going for me.

Yes only do this when you have cheap to no electricy cost. Else it will be a failing venture most likely.

I did it with an S3, 1 year ago. Then after 1 month i gave up and went back to slush.

it is all or nothing.

I don't know where you live. 

But 2 S-7's would earn  about 20 usd a day for you. on a safe pool like f2pool they would pay you every day.


Solo mining 2 s-7's would earn you 0 if you don't hit a block and it could be over a year before you hit the block (more then likely over a year.)

If I were you  I would try to get an s-3 and mine it solo and maybe a few avalon 6's and mine them in a safe pool.

If u get 2 x S7's why not solo mine on one & pool mine on the other??

That way u earn either way!

I was just thinking before, if you purchase two ASIC miners: both the same and at the same value. If you connect one to a pool such as antpool and one to your own pool (which can be generated from an "always on" computer that you can leave running with bitcoin core running on it and create your own pool of it! See Youtube and Google for information on how to do this) . The always-on computer can be something as rubbish at CPU as a Raspberry Pi for around £30, and if you have a spare hard drive that you could use, then this will sped up the raspberry pi and mean it is less likely to have a corrupt micro SD and wake you up beecause the miner makes rediculous noises as it fails (bitmain's products are said to make loud beeping noises when the connection goes down to them!

Honestly I would use solo ckpool instead - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=763510.0 .  It is a already set up solo pool that has been tested and proven to work.  Also you pay a very small percent and no need of extra gear.

I would use it as stability is something you can count on. It's as easy as pointing miner there so very easy.

The difficult is rising fast. If you solo mine and do not mine a block soon, it will not be easy to mine one block in a few month. With pool mining, you can use some fractions of block now before the difficulty rise further.

You will have more profits if you mine with a pool. Unless you have a big mining farm, and when I mean big I'm talking about BIG. If you have a few machines its best for you to run them in a pool, or else you will be playing kinda like a lottery

Even with big mining equipment the risk is still there of not hitting a block. Granted it's less with so much equipment.  But you would have to have millions in equipment to even think about solo mining as a good idea.

And you would have a LOT of expenses that would make solo mining hard, as you need to pay things such as electricity.

The next difficulty is estimated to rise about 20%. That is a lot. I wonder if the S5 is still profitable for the next month.

a single s5 can earn you $90 per month, with a 0.05 per hour for electricity cost, you have only a consumption of $21

so it's still profitable, because when we were at 0.011 earning the price was only 230, now it's double that, but the earning is not half of it...

Guys, i see your posts from all around the world about the price of KW. In Greece for bills with more than 3000kw per 4 months we pay 0,10252/KW. And then we have 3 different "taxes" for a final bill which gives us about 0.2 euro per KW. Thats insane!!!!!

I assume that instead of KW, you mean KWh?
You may wish to calculate the profits from different leading devices such as: an Antminer s7 and the new Bitfury device that will be released later this year.

But what happens when all the halving has taken place and we hit the proposed 21 000 000 total bitcoins.
The difficulty is already knocking out the small individuals who are presumably the life and blood of the whole system...
Does the whole currency then get sold back to highest bidder ie: illuminati banksters and we are back to square one again..??
How does mining carry on after that if there are no rewards coming from the blockchain ... ??
How does the whole currency perpetuate into the future ... ??

ah the infamous fee era, simply miner will live from the fee made from each transaction, which will have a far greater value(supposedly, otherwise bitcoin is most likely died by that time)

Don't worry, if you have free electricity then you'll be fine and eventually find a block. I for myself am running an Antminer U3 solo and I know a have little chances but still, I prefer to take them!

Not necessarily I think miners have a lifespan of a few year's.   So plugging in a miner even if free electricity unless you have a lot of hash, just is not guarenteed you will hit a block.

The more hash added to network the less likely.  So if anything the longer it takes the less chance of you hitting it as network growth.

Using U3 might take decades to find a block. With the increase of difficulty, there is almost no chance to find a block.

Even years is hopeful. In my experience of the short time that mining hardware has existed, 9 months is more likely as an average. Might be longer in a nice clean cool datacentre but most of us don't have that luxury.