Bitcoin Forum

As everyone story is different, we all pay differently for out power usage.

I have decided to turn my smaller miners that will never make more than a few satoshies over to solo mining.

I have had a few units over the years on pools hit a block so I thought I would just get some low units on the case, you never know

I'm talking about KNC mercury's and under, These units are not worth seling as the price to ship them is more than the unit is worth.

So I was just wondering what you guys are doing with your units that are not profitable?

One thing I will make clear, I am not solo mining with power hungry 1st gen asics like BFL's, those are off possibly for good  :P

anyone else soloing? Are you on a solo pool (one that just takes the mining profits from block and passes the rest to you)

Maybe you are still mining at a loss believing the BTC price will go up again (I also believe this, but it's been months now and I cant wait)

 8)

Yes, there are numerous folks that are now "solo mining". I've even seen folks that will rent hash from Westhash/Nice hash to throw at a solo mining pool. You might want to look in the "Pools" sub-forum for more additional discussion. My most recent recollection was 727miner hit a block on a solo pool, though he had rented some hash as I recall.

I've got 5 Antminer U2 that are pointed to ck.'s solo pool.  Every week, assuming they're not rented out, I point 6 of my S3s there for a day as well.  You never know if they'll hit :).

@alh, 727miner has hit 4 blocks in less than 2 weeks on ck.'s solo pool.  Yes, he rents.

isn't better to use those miners to mine low difficult coins, like old sha256 or new sha256, and try to instamine some early block? i think you can do better than just wasting time with the solo mining

It takes too much time. If you do not have much free time, a better option is to switch off or solo mining.
My bitfurys are off long time.

You can do that, but I seen people been scooping on ebay still selling it as a premium to make up the difference.

They sacrafice maybe $50 difference but thats about it.

OR you can use it to barter for something else on future trades.

I sold in lots or scrapped. Why? Because to run the solo lottery you have to pay electric, and even if you win it is only $7,000. And the odd's are just not there.

also there is a risky that you won't win anything before the block halving, this mean 3500, if the price stay there, this assuming the worst situation of course

I solo mine with an S1, a U3, and 4 nanofuries.


I have an S3+ that mines for me at a loss because I like minting my own coin.  Some day it will be relegated to soloing as well.

I see lot's of people hashing at public solo pools, are any of you solo mining your own Bitcoin node?

Interesting thread. I like the idea to "gamble" with hash power.
What kinda of odds are we up against with current diff ?
I mean if you have 10 GH/s, then must it be possible to calculate the proberbitly to hit a block if you e.g. mine for one day.

It's actually pretty easy to do so... you just figure out how many days at current difficulty it would expect for 10GH/s to find a block:
So, you've got about a 1 in 236673 chance of hitting a block today with that 10GH/s.

If I had rigs I'd play with them just to try.  Those odds seem better than Vegas.  (But I'd rather go there 😀)

Look at it this way... you hit the block of BTC and that'll pay for a pretty nice trip to Vegas :P.

I tried for a little while but it wasn't nearly as stable as mining to ck solo pool.

Better than spending $2 on a Powerball ticket at 1 in 175M for the jackpot.

Not exactly a fair comparison. Solve a block solo, and you have well under $7500. I don't know about you, but that isn't retirement class money for me or my family. On the other hand $50M even after taxes and taking it as a lump sum, IS retirement class money for me and my family.

No, that doesn't mean I play the lottery, just pointing out the absurdity of the comparison.

How did you calculate that? You will need to take the electricity price into consideration as well, if comparing stake and odds.

math is easy if your hash cost under current difficulty but is around 1th you are investing in a high risk high yield medium

if your hash cost is over current difficulty  and is around 1th you are gambling ie you are at unfavorable odds.


so this adjustment 1 th earns 0.0105 so renting under that at say 0.101 is investing meaning odds are in your favor.

renting at 0.0106 means you are gambling meaning odds are against you.

if your gear pulls 1th and uses 1000watts  at 10cents a kwatt you are just about break even so why not solo mine some of it.


http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/1024x768q90/908/dxLat2.png

On the lower end of the spectrum, 100GHs on solo mining would be estimated at 64.5 years for a block and cost you $2354.25 to run  ;D

obviously those figures are useless as the last block is due to be mined at 2040 (ish?) also assuming difficulty does not go up. LOL

Personally it's a gamble, I see it as that, I do not expect a return, i like to get the lottery ticket and I also from time to time buy a scratch card, I like a little dabble, I never spend more than I am willing to loose!

That sounds good actually, because small miners hardly count unless you put them on rent on some site.
I was thinking to give some time to mining(Solo mining) , what do you think would be the correct Hash Power i will need to find a block let's say in a week ?

solo mining with equipment hmm interesting thought but to be honest would waste more energy and power than finding a block with minamul equipment for mining. Done for other alts in past but BTC mehh leave on never come back would be like million to 1 odds if mining a block would be nice tho to solo mine generate blck. If got free energy then no harm in leaving on and maybe finding some random block.

I believe you need to have around 0.3% of the network to get a block a week. 1PH.

1 PH :-\
That sounds too much :D
Thanks anyway

It's definitely not 1PH/s.  You can solve the equation yourself and figure out how much hash you need to have in order to expect to find a block in a week:
So, you'd need to have about 338TH/s.

You'd be hard pressed to find anyone with a "home setup" pumping out over 300TH/s.

This. To put it into perspective, a single current gen miner such as the Antminer S5 can pump out slightly over 1 TH/s. In order to get 300 TH/s, you would need a mining farm with almost 300 of these miners.

Yup.  With the current hardware I would say the upper limit of a "home setup" would be about 10TH/s, where 1TH/s would be an average home setup.  My little mine pumps out 0.8TH/s.  :D

It really depends on your home's service.  Somebody with a few 240V30A breakers could drive a lot more hash than somebody who only has 120V15A circuits.  In the US at least, the vast majority of homes aren't going to have those 240V circuits, or if they do, they're already being utilized for things like the electric dryer, range and central AC.  Good luck convincing the significant other that you're going to get rid of those appliances to mine BTC :).

I have 8 S3s, totaling about 3.65TH/s.  If I were to replace them with S5s, I'd end up with about 5.75TH/s for just about the same power usage.

I wasn't even thinking about electrical service, just the practicality of where to put all the hardware.  But the two are pretty much the same thing for the home miner, since you'll reach the limits of home space about the time you reach the limits of your electrical service.

I don't know about that... I could stack quite a few miners in my basement/garage if I had the power available :).  Last year I tried to convince the little lady to let me call an electrician and have some wiring done... I really wanted to throw a rack of SP3Xs in the garage.  She told me I was nuts.  So, I stuck with the smaller equipment running on the standard household service.  I think she was just a little put off at the noise... that SP10 I had screamed.

Thanks for the calculation. I really suspected this value to be much higher, I guess it's just bad luck when pools that have this value or more do struggle.

While I don't completely get the math, I do have to ask about the word "expect". Does that mean a 50/50 chance in the week? 95% chance, or what? We've obviously seen pools with 2+ PH that have gone 50 hours between blocks (i.e. bad luck). So it would seem that even with 500 TH you could easily go a week without hitting a block.

That's why I ask about your level of "expectation" in a week (i.e. confidence level).

Let me try and help you with that.  First, what do the numbers in my equation mean?  Well, it's actually a simplified version (that's accurate enough for the purposes of figuring this out).  Let me put in words what I wrote above in numbers:
In other words, since I know the current network difficulty, what a difficulty 1 share is worth (this is the approximation... I'll post the real values if you want) and how long I want to wait to find a block, I can calculate how much hash power I would need to find a block in that time frame.

So why do I keep using the word "expect"?  Because it's probability.  As you noted, just because the formula says you should find a block in the given timeframe, there's absolutely no guarantee that you will.  In fact, there are formulas for that as well.  Take a look at CDF (cumulative distribution function).  The CDF will tell us that 98% of all blocks will be found at under 400% luck, about 88% of blocks will be found at under 200% luck.  100% luck is around 64% or so.

So, is 64% the confidence level?  It's just another way to express the probabilistic data.  Just like a pool with 500TH/s could easily go for a week without hitting a block, so too could that pool hit 2 blocks seconds apart.

While everyone should be running a node at home no matter what, there's the orphan risk issue of using it for solo.
Pools with fast hardware, high speed internet, relay connected, and lots of connections still get orphans.
You'd expect a lot higher % of orphans at home unless you setup your Bitcoin node as well as a pool does.

2140, off by 100 years.

The only little miner I have is an Antminer U2. I just point that to bitsolo.net for fun. I doubt I will ever find a block but, hey, never know if you don't try!

50% chance, meaning that on average you will find one block per week if you have 338TH/s.

Of course with 500TH would would on average 1.47 blocks a week or a block every 4.7 days or so, but it wouldn't be outside the realms of possibility that you would go a week without mining a block, in fact it is more likely that you mining 2 blocks in 2 days..