Bitcoin Forum

If I have about 12 THash/s of personal miners is it better to mine solo or mine in a pool?

The way I understand it...........
You have about 0.0001 of the total hash rate so ........you'll find a block every 10000 .

If I am doing the math correctly you would MAYBE find a block every 300 days or so. Im not sure about this but thats what I think it is.

That's like asking if you would rather work for a living or put your life savings on a gamble. There is a chance you'll never find a block solo-mining. Stick with guaranteed payouts from a pool. My opinion.

As noted above you have a 1/300 chance of finding a block today, but as each difficulty period goes by that number will decrease.  If you happen to get lucky and find a block in 4 months you will come out ahead and get 25.xx BTC solo mining. The more likely scenario is that difficulty will multiply by another 5-8x by the time the 300 days has arrived, at that point in time you'll have a 1/1500 chance of finding a block at best.

Solo mining would be like gambling.  As a rule you would want about 1 block a day on average to seriously consider solo mining.

Pools is safer

Its just luck.
Solo: Not guaranteed mining rewards. But if you get a reward, its 25BTC.(very big amount)
Pool: Guaranteed rewards. But small amounts.

You're doing the math wrong, then.  Here's the correct math:
As it has been pointed out, that is at the current difficulty.  You'd have to recalculate every difficulty change to find out your expected time to block.

With only 12TH/s, pool mining is by far your better option.

I would prefer pool mining, 12 Thash is too low for solo.

I would surely go for a pool.

Even though you still have a considerable amount of hashing power, you still are better off pool mining based on the probability of finding a block. To find a block a day solo, you need around 900 th/s at the current difficulty. With 12th/s, you're looking at a chance of finding a block in 77 days.  With a pool, you're going to earn around 0.3 btc per day and decrease a few percentage roughly ever 11-14 days.

Yeah! Like everybody said, you should also go for pool. Try using Slush's pool . It would be better, IMO or you can use p2pool mining. For full list of pools, check here (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Comparison_of_mining_pools) and you can check p2pool nodes here (http://p2pool-nodes.info) ( BT Thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=264533.0) )

Kindly,
     MZ

Pool for sure... solo is like gambling..

all of the above advice is wrong but not that wrong.

1) to solo mine you need to run a server with bitcoin-qt  that means you need to spend  extra power to solo mine

2) if a real pool offered solo mining server  like http://bitsolo.net/ does  you no longer need to spend extra power to solo mine


3) So first advice is you need to decide the power cost you will do to solo mine.


Once you figure the power you need to spend to run a real solo mining setup.  You need to see what pool fees are from a pool on 12th.


Ie if running your own server costs 50 usd a month  and the pool fees on 12th of earnings are  75usd a month for a shared pool.

In the long run solo mining is better

Now everyone above is focused on  variance and leaving out the facts above.



As for variance risk   you can get crushed .  

your chance for hitting a block today is 77 to one.

 next jump it will go up.  

So if you want to solo mine for  12th  1 day on a real server  the cost will be  the .3221 btc you would have earned mining  and the power to run that solo mining server.  


Frankly If you know how to set up a server to run the bt-qt in server mode and want to run for 1 day today  you are spending 2 or 3 bucks to run the server and you are spending .3221 btc you would have earned in a regular pool.

 so you would spend about 200 usd for a 77 to 1 shot at 1 block.


BTW my vote is run solo 1 day a week run pools 6 days a week.  I do that here with underclock/undervolted usb sticks as a test study. I can't justify running a pc as a dedicated server for solo so I use bitsolo.net

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/1280x1024q90/539/lqH20h.png

It all depends what you think about gambling and how badly you need the BTC.  If you want to take a risk then go solo.  If you are PLANNING on having the BTC then you'd want to be sure of it so I'd go with a pool.  Obviously yes, you also have the chance of winning a block faster than 300 days so you have a chance for a BIG win.  It's a risk.  Hey here's an idea...mine solo until you find a block (hope it's faster than 300 days) and then go to a pool since the chance you find another block is that it would be another 300 days.

+1.
Nice! :) Did you solve any blocks? If you did, how much GHs you had? I hard that you can do Namecoin in bitsolo, is it profitable @ <0.10/watt ?
Kindly,
       MZ

my chance of solving a block with 15gh is one in 62000 if I mine an entire day .

I do not believe I will ever win a block. with 15gh.

my cost for that 1/62000 chance is  .0004026 btc  .  this is what those 15gh earn when they mine in a pool.

that is .23 cents  so for .23 cents I can win about 14000 dollars.

  now I mine in a pool the other 6 days. I earn 6 x .23 cents = 1.38 in the week or 5.25 a week

power cost to mine is  3.30 a month.  so right now this setup is making 2 dollars a month profit.

the sticks have roi'd.  so that cost is 0. I run the router and switches for other mining .

 I use a mac mini to do this and that runs 24/7/365 for other work.  So my results are 2 dollar a month profit  and 4 or 5 days where I can win  a block outright.

solo mining works for every one if they are making a profit with pool mining. just need to figure how often to solo mine

 this is why no major pool wants the secret to get out as it will hurt them. Most people just don't get the math of this and  mine in pools.

you need to solo mine with gear that turns a profit for a small part of the time.

deciding what percent is important.

Bitsolo have not found a block since that individual got lucky in June. I do like just 50 gh/s there too, its like if you hit you hit, if not no big deal. Just a scratch off lotto ticket