Bitcoin Forum

I know little about pool mining.
But I think the pool's job is just to devide the proof-of-work into many small one.
So I guess It  only makes the profit comes more steady instead of more profitable.

The answer is not that simple. If you have enough hash rate to effectively mine solo, solo mining is more profitable.

If you do not, you join a pool in order to reduce variance. There are pools that do not charge a fee. Those pools are more profitable, if you can stand the variance (they are typically smaller so they are exposed to more visible variance).

I would mine at P2Pool if I were mining Bitcoins. No fee. All the advantages of solo mining with all the advantages of sharing the reward like traditional pools.

Pools are much more steady, solo mining is very slow unless you have a ridiculous amount of hashing power. The overall payout for both over a long period is similar.

Some guy just mined 3 blocks in a row... 75 btc he received... worth about 45k USD? It could be profitable, but remember you're going up against the BTC Guild's and the GHash.IO's of the world.

Not if you have so little hashrate that you mine a block or less per week while the difficulty goes up. Basically, as long as you can predict that difficulty will increase, you need to reduce your variance so that you usually get close to your expected payout over a two week period. Otherwise, you might find yourself taking three weeks to find a block that met the last difficulty level, but not the current (higher) difficulty, wasting your potential to make more at the lower difficulty.

Well, statistically speaking, the expected payout is always a bit higher with solo-mining (with no pool fee), but the variance will be very high as you may only be able to find a block for several weeks, months and even years (depending on your hashrate).

I've been mining dogecoin.. Between that and middlecoin, I still managed to make a good profit..

Thanks

With low difficulty coins you should be able to solo mine and receive similar/greater profits than using a pool. However if the difficulty is too high you risk never solving a block. So it really depends on what you're mining, and your hashrate.

Depends on your luck.

If I had been mining solo,   I would have paid for my hardware several times over by now as I have found several blocks.

But since I was in a pool, the earnings were shared, so I'm still behind the curve on equipment payback.

Over the VERY long haul,  it's the same minus the pool fee (or pool theft)

Also, pools usually have more downtime than solo mining.  Assuming your internet connection is solid and you keep the coin client running 24/7.

Found blocks when pool mining do not mean found blocks if you had been solo mining.  Work assignment to miners is different when solo'ing.

I used p2pool with a low hashrate mining setup, and never got a payout. I would recommend against it for entry-level miners.

Correct, in fact because most pools charge a fee— and practically all except p2pool expose to to some risk of theft by the pool operator or to the pool being hacked— they reduce your income somewhat.

But they make payments more stable.  I strongly recommended p2pool— it eliminates the risk of theft and the centralization of network resources.  It doesn't provide as much variance reduction as other pools, though then again, if you're a very small miner you're not exactly counting on a payment every day to put food on the table.