Bitcoin Forum

Just curious what people's opinions are that have actually tried Solo mining. Most websites do not recommend Solo mining calling it a waste of time. Are there any successful Solo miners out there that believe in it?

Pooled mining = steady job
Solo mining = playing the lottery for jackpots of 1000 dollars

See the difference now?

but playing the lottery with 0% house edge. Important difference from normal lottery.

It's not worth to solo mine without having at least 50-100 GH/s unless you like huge variance in payouts, when there are 0% fee pools and P2P pools. By using a pool you also don't have to rely on your Internet connection if it failed you while solo mining you risk losing the opportunity to solve a block, if you are on a pool, you'll just miss a share.

I ran into this attitude over 2 years ago and it irritates me too.  Once you start mining in a pool then they'll complain about what pool you use.

It is true that solo mining is a big gamble and probably won't pay off.  But if you like that go for it.  If not then pool mine and setup failovers.  I guess you could set your local bitcoind as your primary pool and failover to regular pools if you like.

No matter what you do someone will complain so just do whatever you want and have fun with it.
Good Luck,
Sam

Do you like gambling?

Your expectation will be a few percentage points higher (no pool fees) but your deviation will go up several orders of magnitude.

Would you prefer a constant pay packet every week or the possibility of getting a years pay one day throughout the year.

Technically speaking the payouts before fees should be exactly the same between solo mining and pool mining - you just have to wait a long time (years) before it evens out.

Many people are willing to accept a small fee (0-2%) for the sake of reducing that variance.

Every week? If you are comparing mining to a normal job's salary then I'd actually prefer a years pay immediately. Throughout the year money loses value due to monetary inflation and goods' price inflation. Not to mention the opportunity cost of receiving the money at a later time when they could be invested into something immediately and some of the profits on that investment would be to pay off the living costs and the rest would be reinvested.

The years pay would be on a randomly allocated day to uphold the analogy :) You don't get to choose when you receive it. It could be the last day of the year :P

with a normal pc or a few gpus you will never get any bitcoins, other coins maybe.

i'm not sure if the lotery analogy is exact. it looks like faster computers have advantage and they compete between them.

It depends on how often you want to see coins generated by your rig(s). If you want to see them on a daily basis, then you are stuck mining the lower difficulty coins, like BBQCoin, MinCoin, CHNCoin. All of these are under 100 diff. If you are fine with coins generated weekly, then you can move up to the slightly harder coins like FeatherCoin or LiteCoin.

The expected value of solo mining versus mining in a pool that takes a cut (or can in theory steal your BTC) is actually higher than that of pool mining.  However, with pool mining, the variance in results is smoothed out.  You are very likely to get paid steadily.

However, with solo mining, anything you mine is your own, and no dishonest pool or third party can simply steal your BTC.  You might make nothing for a long period of time, or you might get way more than your "fair" share of blocks.

So it all comes down to your tolerance for risk.  If you need steady income from mining to keep your lights on and your rigs running, pool mining is the way to go.  If you just like certainty, pool mining is the way to go.  If you would rather maximize expected value and it doesn't matter terribly to you if you quite possibly don't get any blocks at all for a period of time (and if the difficulty increases during a bad spell you might miss out entirely on a profit opportunity), then solo mining is no more a waste of time than pooled mining.

As long as you understand the risk and potential variance-- it is your choice.  
I solo mined most of last year.  I managed to solve blocks as close together as 28 hours, and as [censored]ing painfully far apart as 7 weeks.  

Everyone focuses on the negative side, but you've got just as much chance of beating the curve.  You have to know the odds though - most ppl wouldn't solo if they're expecting 1 block per year.

solo mining was good back than, but it can still be profitable if you have the righ hash power

We had an 11 hour block in the pool less than a week ago.  I was 1/4684 of pool has power.  By my calculates at a steady rate IF nothing happened it would had taken nearly 6 years.  Difficulty likely increased to a point that the block would never get submitted.  Even an extremely lucky block would take 1-2 months.  Thats with 1.9GH.  Even with 100GH that 11 hour block would have taken 40+ days.

It's simply a matter of math. Unless you have an absurd amount of computing power (way more than a few GPU's) you're just never going to find a block in a reasonable amount of time, even if the difficulty were to never change. But it is changing, and going up rapidly. It's entirely possible you would never find a block at all by solo mining when you factor in the difficulty increases. On the other hand, with a pool you're pretty much guaranteed to get something for even a modest amount of effort.

I'm pool mining with a mere 500 MH/sec and I'm getting about 0.18 BTC per week. That's not much, granted, and a lot of people will tell me how I'm wasting my time because I should just buy BTC, but I'm not mining for quick profits. I'm doing so because I like the idea of mining, I wanted to learn more about it, and I thought that it was a better way of acquiring BTC than dealing with the exchanges. I'll probably hold onto my meager earnings long-term and see where this whole Bitcoin thing goes. And I'll probably switch my GPU's to some alternate cryptocurrency when and if my BFL order ever arrives.

The not guaranteed part is why its a waste of time.  With a pool you may be paying 2% but will (currently) get somewhere between 10-30 payouts A DAY typical for a big pool.  

With ASIC coming online especially you want to get as much work done as fast as possible.

I solo mined CNC for a bit against everyones advice. Found 2 blocks in 3 days with 1.4 Mh/s but then the price crashed :(

There comes a time when you wont get anymore than penies but you wont get paid because the minimal amount you need to get a payout is 0.1 BTC ($10 USD)  Are there any pools that have a lower limit like 0.01 USD ?   There comes a time when if your hash is too low, you are better off solo mining.  At least you have a chance.

 ;D

I'm surprised the p2pool fanatic's haven't chimed in on this one.

P2pool will payout your portion every time a block is found regardless of how small your share is.

Read up on "bag of pennies" wallet and the ramifications of that for you.
Sam

deepbit and slush let you withdrawal 0.01  

there's probably some others

I use Slush's Pool. One of the things it reports is how many blocks you have found. I've found none. I'm running about 100 Mhs. If i wasn't in a pool, i wouldn't have nuttin', and probably wouldn't live long enough to get anything. I'm old. So yeah, with a pool i at least got something other than just Electric bills.

hahaha good example XD

because you may not find anything for a long time ....

It's not a 'waste' of time, if you have a really good computer, or if you have very good luck.


But, because of the difficulty to mine, even in pools as shot through the roof, it does make it harder.

Solo mining is like playing the lottery, if you win you win big.

Not exactly true.  The p2pool doesn't have infinite resources so the share chain only records so many shares.  If your hashing power is very low then there is a high probability you won't have any shares in the share chain at the time a block is found.

Well that wasn't an option.  Maybe an example helps. 

Your employer is willing to hire you under either one of these options:
$100K annually paid $1,923.08 a week
OR
a 1% chance each week of getting $208,000 (EV = $104K annually a 4% bonus over the salary option)

This is your only source of income which would you pick? 
On average, taking the lottery option you will get one paycheck a year but you could get more than one or none in any particularly year.

The expected return on solo is the same or very close to that with pool mining, depending on the pool you choose. So, it means bitcoin solo mining carries a MUCH higher risk (unless your hash rate is very very high) but pretty much the same expected return.

It's no wonder why most people don't do it. In normal investment, if an asset carries more risk, people require a risk premium in the expected returns.

D&T,
Thank for the info.

This is a little troubling since what is "very low" hash rate is in state of flux at the moment and soon "very low" could be measured in Ghs.

I'd say that if your share rate is measured by a single digit Ghs, where you mine may not matter much in the coming months :-)

exactly

my thoughts exactly and more or less what i was just going to post.
:)

I typically set my payout every 5-7 days even if I only had a single 200MH/s card the payout would be higher than that.  Usually I can get 0.5BTC in 4-7 days with current hardware. 2x7950, 2x7870

WARNING !! Solo mining does not constitue gambling. It is the epitime of the crypto currency movement.

In fact, when you join a pool, you are helping to centralize the hashpower of a decentralized currency. Wrap your brain around that one. ahah..

This problem can be avoided, for the most part, if pools were limited to 5% of the total network hashpower. Asic hoarders aren't helping matters much either.

so an owner of an avalon asic could actually do ok (for now) by solo mining?

maybe this explains why they are still being tested...

I understand ASIC premium but I'm seeing a lot of older FPGA for sale costing near double for the hashing power in video cards lol.

Well low is relative to p2pool total hashing power.  IIRC (been a while since I did any mining) p2pool "share chain" is ~5000 shares long and with dynamic difficulty that means you would want to have at least 1/5000th of total hashing power of the pool.  That would still be a little low because due to volatility 50% of the time you would have no shares in the chain when a block was found (sometimes you would have 2+ but that doesn't reduce volatility).  With more like 1/1000th of pool hashing power most of the time (~90% of blocks) you will have at least one share in the chain.  If p2pool reached 1 terrahash then like MH/s scale miners wouldn't be very viable.  10TH/s would probably kill off most GPU miners too.

Note if p2pool uses a longer or shorter share chain now you should adjust those numbers.

I like the Ying Yang approach. heh..

You either will or won't find a block. Regardless of the odds, difficulty ect. Its 50/50.

All you have to do is try.