Bitcoin Forum

If you don't have up to par mining equip, you should pool, am I right?

You can do whatever you want. If you are feeling lucky, you can even mine with 3Mh/s. If you want predictable and guaranteed income, then pooling.

I've got 4 BE's on solopool right now.  I'm trying not to look at it.

The expected return— that is the average over all possible futures— is the same for either (ignoring any outages, pool fees, pool stales, any differential risk of theft/hacks at pools/locally).  The variance of returns is what differs. If you're not depending on every cent of mining income for anything in particular you might prefer a higher variance option over fees and pool related risks.  If you're the sort of person who likes to gamble then solo mining should be unusually attractive because the odds are in your favor (assuming you're mining at a profit even in the pooled case).

There are things in between just pooled and solo. E.g. with p2pool you can turn your share difficulty up fairly high.

That's $200 annually in a pool on a static 5P network mining $1000 BTC.

Solo, that's one block every 5 million blocks, or every 95 years.

So I guess it's a question of life expentancy.  Do you smoke?  Exercise regularly?

There's a pool joke in there somewhere, but I can't find it.

I noticed that P2Pool also gives 0.5% of the reward to the miner that found the block and then divides the remaining 99.5% of the reward among the rest of the miners that participated.

Is this higher reward to the miner that solved the block common among pools or is this unique to P2Pool?