Bitcoin Forum

I have a couple of questions related to solo mining scrypt based coins.

1. Does the chances of discovering a block depend upon your hashing power?

2. When a coin is relatively new, the difficulty is quite low. At this point, is it better to solo mine that coin, or just join a pool?

3. I don't have huge hashing power at my disposal. Just one 1.4 MH/s mining rig. However, when a new coin comes up that I'm interested in, and when the number of people mining it is low, is it feasible to mine it solo?

1) Yes - the higher the difficulty the more energy (ie hashing) must be spent trying to solve the block
2) New coins will usually not have a pool ready since they will be... new.  Not too many people know how to properly set up a pool and would dedicate resources to it without it having any merit.  Solo mining is the only option then.  If there's a pool setup for a coin, it's probably better to pool mine that coin.
3) If some new alt comes out you can try solo mining it on day 1.  Ultimately you're chasing a gimmick 99% of the time (by history).

Thanks for the answers. Suppose I read about a coin which isn't new, yet the difficulty is very low. Pools do exist for this coin, which have collected anywhere between 30 MH/s to 500 MH/s. In such a case, would there be any situation in which solo mining is better than pool mining?