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Hello. I was told mining in a pool is to let you gain steadily, not to let you gain more. That infers, mining in a pool gains averagly the same as mining solely.

That cannot explain why 90% users mine in pools. If it is in their nature to avoid risk, then they probably wouldn't invest in mining bitcoin in the first place. So is it really true that besides the advantage of stability of gain, there is no advantage of gain itself, in average, by joining a pool?

I am going to mine solely because I prefer the thrill of getting a lot of coins and can stand 4 years of labour without any gain, but only if the gain is averagely the same.

Mining in a pool actually gives you less because the pool charges a fee of 1 - 5%.

It's extremely difficult to find a block all by yourself unless you have insane hashing power under your belt.  Imagine mining for months and not hitting the jackpot.  People use pools because they earn little by little all the time; instead of hoping they eventually hit a block, they'll know they'll hit one as a group and will take a portion of the reward based on how much hashing power they're putting into the pool.

You can attempt to mine solo to claim the reward all on your own.  Just don't get discouraged if you don't find one for a while.

My (perhaps limited) knowledge is that mining in a pool will give you more consistent payouts, as you've got the power of the pool behind you.  With solo mining, it's a crap shoot.  You could get a block on your own in minutes (so very unlikely) or months, if ever.  I decided to join a pool to build up a coin-base.  If I ever had super high gh/s, perhaps solo, but I just don't think it's worth it to me.

not only a while. A year for most of us, except if you have 7500GH/s

4 years is a bit much, you might not find a block until after the reward halves, in which case a pool would actually have payed more

You got it.  Mine in the pool and you're guaranteed a payout.


 :o  Didn't know that!  Now solo mining really is out of the question ;D

lol not really that high speed, but slow speed really doesn't yield anything.

the thing is.. if you try solo, you can have a LOT of time without mining anything.
in pool... well, it's just a little better ;)

So as a rough guide, at which speed would you have better luck solo mining vs pooled?
Has anyone compared say 3000khs solo and pool simultaneously for a set time period
to see which is the better choice (in regards to ltc)?

http://allchains.info/calc.html

enter your hashrate and it will tell you the average time to find a block in hours at the bottom.

This is very interesting and I've always been curious about it. Thanks.

Is that really so? If you mean, the current bitcoin costs less USD than in the future, that getting something now is better than getting some thing in the future, then, you have to factor in that getting bitcoin solely now is also easier than getting it in the future. It is not sure pool pays more.

no, once every roughly four years the block reward halves, it used to be 50 BTC now it is 25BTC for the same work, in 4 years it will be 12.5 BTC

After reading this thread... I have one question....  If you are mining Solo, do you have to leave your rig running until you find a block in order to be paid out.  Or is it like what the calculators tell you.. that you'll be earning $____/day? 

if you are mining solo you will only get BTC when you find a block, dollars don't come into it until you sell

Ahhh ok, so that makes sense!  The calculators are deceiving, showing that you'll be earning 0.00___ BTC/day. So I could literally be mining for years before seeing a cash out in BTC?  Looks like pool mining is for me.

ok so can someone tell this noob what my hashrate would be with a nvidia geforce gt 520?

nvidia are... well bad for mining... but here you go
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

Hi,

I have a couple of related questions on this as i was wondering the same thing:

1) At what point is it better to go Solo mining? Say you had 50GH/s or 100GH/z - is it still best to stick to a pool?  If so what types / ones for that sort of power?

2) Are those mining calculators quite accurate on the days to find a block and the payout?

Thanks,

Elliot

1) At whatever point you feel comfortable, Personally i wouldn't solo mine with less than 500GH/s (...so i don't solo mine, lol) at current difficulty

2) the calculators show you the average time based on current difficulty and 50% luck... luckier and you will find a block quicker, unluckier it will take longer.

Nothing is guaranteed, solo mining or mining in a pool.  I've seen a pool that should average 3-4 hours per block take more than 24.  Solo mining gives you this same risk, only multiplied.  If the calculator says you'll find a block roughly every month.. well guess what, during the course of a month the network difficulty will go up twice.  So not only do you risk missing your target, but the network keeps moving the goalposts.  If you're pushing 65,000 MH/s, at current network difficulty you should find a block about every 7 days.  I wouldn't bother solo mining much lower than that, as there's a big chance you'l be "unlucky" and the difficulty will increase before you even find a block.

Thank you drakahn  ... very informative results from the calculator there ... pool mining it is. could you take a look at my miner problems in the thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=181290.0 noob needs help getting guiminer up and running??

Solo you avoid fees, but the fees are actually cheaper than cost of variance. Also, mining solo it'd be very easy to "feel cheated", almost like a bad beat streak in online poker. If you're on the far end of the standard diviation scale, you can't really prove if it was chance or not.

May sound paranoidish, but I like to feel confident in my investments:)

Thanks for the info.  Do you have any suggested pools or pool types for between the 50-100GH/s setup?  I'm planning on building a largish rig  soon :)

Nope! Not nearly so bad.

At current difficulty and 1Ghps the median solve time is 309 days, and the 95% confidence interval is between 11 days and 1645 days. That big confidence interval is why miners use pools - huge variance.

Although the median solve time might only be less than a year, it wouldn't be unlikely for it to take 4.5 years. As difficulty gets larger the confidence interval expands, so it's conceivable that you might never solve a block. Or you could solve one in a couple of weeks.

...By which you mean "I have a pre-order in on some ASIC miners", right?  I mean, you couldn't possibly think it was a good idea to build a large GPU farm... right?

Any of the pools that support GBT will do fine.  Take a look at this list here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Comparison_of_mining_pools

I'm still weighing up options.  It's not that unrealistic is it? 4 newish GPU's per machine, 500MH/s each GPU. You're only taling 10 or 15 machines. Plus it has the benefit of switching to LTC unlike ASIC?

well sure, have you planned for power requirements and cost?

Let's say you bought a bunch of 7950's.  According to the mining hardware comparison chart (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison), high-end, you'll get 600 MH/s out of each of them.  So just to get to 50 GH/s (50,000 MH/s), you need 84 of them (well... 83.3333... but let's round up).  Divide by 4 per machine, that's 21 machines. But that's not even the point...  

Let's say you can get a good deal on all those 7950's.  $250 USD each sound fair?  For 84 cards at a good price, you'll pay $21,000.  Just for the cards.  Now you need 21 motherboards, 21 processors, 21 sticks of ram, 21 PSU's, 21 harddrives (or USB keys, most likely).  The motherboards can't be total trash, because you need at least 4 PCI-E slots.. (1x lanes are fine, but then you need PCI-E 1x to PCI-E 16x riser cables.).  The real stickler will be the PSU's.  4 GPU's are going to pull ~800 watts.  After the hardware cost, your major and ongoing cost will be electricity, so you'll want an efficient PSU.  PSU's operate most effeciently around 50% load.  Maybe you can get away with a 1200W power supply, which would be 66.67% load.  The cheapest one at Newegg is $150 USD and operates at 87% efficiency.  There's $20 rebate too, but I doubt they'll let you claim it 21 times.  So another $3,150 on power supplies.  And we'll say the CPU/MB/RAM/USB key run another $150 each, so yet another $3,150...

GPUs x 84: $21,000
PSUs x 21:  $3,150
Rest of it:  $3,150
Total: $27,300
Output: 50,000 MH/s

Total Wattage of GPU's: 16,800
Wattage @ 87% eff.: 19,310

Cost of electricy (guess) $0.15/kWh.
Cost to run these machines for 24Hrs: $70
Cost to run these machines for 1 year: $25,550

Cost of upgrading your electric service to supply an additional 160 Amps of service...????


With me so far?

Cost last batch of Avalon ASICs: 75 BTC... or $8,775 at the exchange rate *right now*.
Output >65,000 MH/s *each*
Wattage: 620W
Cost to run this machine for 24Hrs: $2.25
Cost to run this machine for a year: $821.25

Soo... Does it make more sense to spend >$27K on a GPU based system, plus $25K per year in electricity?  Or just $9K on a system that provides 130% of the performance and only costs $821.25 per year to operate?  And remember that Bitcoin offers diminishing returns every 2 weeks.  You may find that the diminishing returns far outpace your ability to recover the cost of a $27K investment.

[EDIT]
Heck, I forgot about COOLING cost.  The 21 machine GPU farm equates to a 20kW furnace, running 24/7.  A 20kW furnace is sufficient to heat a 1500-2000 sqft home, and they don't tend to run 24/7.  Unless you live in a year-round sub-zero climate, expect your cooling costs to increase by another $25k per year also.
[/EDIT]

Thanks for that, great post / info.

It would appear that ASIC's are the way to go from, unless i can figure out free power and cooling :D.  However from what i've read they are seriously hard to come by? BFL haven't shipped any despite a lot of promises (that's the impression i get anyway), and the Avalon's are sold out?

Quite correct on ASIC scarcity.  I'm hoping there's a "batch #4" from Avalon soon...

There are other options.  If you believe in Bitcoin enough to sink tens of thousands into hardware, you might consider just buying some BTC.  You'll have to decide for yourself whether now is the right time to buy or not.  Personally, I'm feeling bearish in the short-term... but long term I think the price will continue to increase.  You could also invest in one of the ASIC mining contracts.  Most of these won't be "going live" until maybe July, by which time maybe BFL will have shipped (or not, heh).  As with all deals you see here, do your due diligence and *buyer beware*.  Scammers are a "Millie (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/MilliBit)" a million.