Bitcoin Forum

Ok I have 20 gpu's coming on saturday... I might go into solo mining... unless anyone can find objections? Question is how do I do it... Ill have a 5 rig setup, do I create a server computer and direct everything to that? If poss can peeps send me a few how to links?

I know solo is more risky but in the long run am I looking at more payoff?

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but in the long run, statistically, you're looking at exactly the same payoff going either way.  The downside of pools is the fees.

Theoretically if you mine solo for a year and mine in a 0% pool for a year, you should get almost exactly the same amount of coins.  Point in case, there was a post from Slush from Slush' pool a while back where he said he had found enough blocks to have made 4000 BTC on his own, meanwhile having pooled the entire time, he received 4018 BTC from his pooled mining.

So, the key is, do you want to make a little bit consistently or make big chunks at random intervals?  Theoretically over the long term it shouldn't matter.

I don't like the massive variance of solo even at 10ghash+/s.

Just join a pool and get steady daily payments. It makes more sense unless you are into gambling.

There is nothing to guarantee you will actually find as many blocks in a year as you would make from a pool. It could even out in 6 months, 12 months or 5 years.

If you occassionally need to pay running costs like electricity or spare parts from your BTC earnings you are screwed as a solo miner if you haven't earned anything for ages.
You can't predict your income on a monthly basis which makes it unprofessional IMO.

I believe you are right this is why the larger pools are more steady over the short term but return the same long term.

Also what GPUs did you get and how are you going to set them all up?

i got xfx 5870's, im going to use amd clock tool to put them near to 1000/185 as i am currently running.

Im gonna use extenders to put four each on asus 890fx boards, sempron 140 with unlocked core and 4gb ram. Ill run them singularly rather than in crossfirex as i understand i may have issues. If you think I shouldnt do solo then I wont as im looking to pay the rig off asap and then i can take gambles with solo if needs be

I'm not going to get into the debate about solo vs pool. They both have some merit, and I like the idea that you are supporting the original concept of bitcoin via solo, but anyway that's irrelevant.

As to HOW to do it, here is a good guide:

http://hardwaredoken.com/blog/?p=239&page=4

I'm fairly sure it is still accurate.

Top guy! just what i needed, i may run 10 cards on solo to see what happens for a week or so

Yeah, I wobble back and forth honestly.  It's hard to watch your machines run all day and check your bitcoin client and see no change day after day. :)  That little trickle that constantly comes in from a pool is nice, but you always have that thought in the back of your mind that it'd be nice to hit those big 50 coin payouts.

Whatever you do, pick one and stick to it for a good period of time.  Solo mining is an utter waste if you don't stick to it because if you solo for a week or two and find nothing and then switch to pool, you've lost that two weeks of income you could have been making from a pool.  Like I said earlier, if you solo or pool, it'll all end out close to even in the long run, just don't keep switching back and forth, that'll bite you in the arse.

This adress, didnt work :(

Do you have somethnig else.

I may be wrong here but do you not get some share of transaction fees as well by solo mining or is this just further down the line

You are correct. Transaction fees get paid out to you when you find the block.

Solo mining is a good way to go, or if you're into pools then join small ones or start ones with friends. There's too many people mining in large pools these days. Too many pool operators getting paid for doing nothing but a little server maintenance -_-.

I want to try solo with 2 computers, and want to know more about correct connection. Also I want to include my friends in the future.

Not satisfied with pool mining in last few days.

I'll describe my solo setup.  I'm at 7 GH/s, but I recently joined a 0% pool (btcguild) since the variance was just too high.  I have 7 machines running ubuntu, and 1 virtual machine on my server also running ubuntu.  The miners were connecting to an instance of pushpool / simplecoin on the virtual machine, which I had modified with a couple lines of php code to send me a text message if any of them went inactive.  I liked the setup, but after 3 weeks of not generating a block, I said screw it. 

Alternatively, you could just simply connect to the bitcoin client, but you lose the long polling support, and you don't get the handy charts and data.

The most important thing, in my opinion, is the remote power switch.  These things generate heat, and they will crash, a lot.  The iBoot remote power switch is a worthy investment, since it will continuously ping the machine, and if it doesn't respond for a period of time, it will cut the power, and restart the machine.  It minimizes downtime, and thus pays for itself over time.  Make sure the machines start up mining though, otherwise, what is the point.

If you are comfortable with linux, I'd seriously recommend ubuntu.  It is fairly simple to get setup, and you can use ssh and screen to bring all your miners together in one management interface.  I pull up the screen instance on my virtual machine, and then simply select the machine I want to view, and run through the miner instances to make sure they are all running right.

Good luck

+1, Credit Card Bills and Electricity Bills wait for no one.

Gnaget,
I, see you have bad luck with solo mining. Maybe is pooling better solution.
But, about long polling support. I must change pool constantly (slush, btcguild or deepbit).
In first few hours, all of them have good statistics, who rapidly down after 12-24 h.
I don't know, why this happening with my miners.

Yeah, unless you are able to find a block at least every other day solo mining (you need at least 50 GH/s right now to do that), I'd go pool.

I didn't have bad luck, my first 5 days, I generated 2 blocks.  I simply decided the loss of transaction fees were inconsequential, and so a pool was the best option.  As far as your miners going down, I assume you mean performance wise.  How are you managing your heat?  If you don't keep a good airflow over your cards, their performance will go down substantially.  I have a couple of portable a/c units, and keep a high power air circulation fan trained on my machines.  The combination has worked well so far, and keeps me running at 7 GH/s.  If I don't, my speed will go down to 6 GH/s and the heat will potentially damage the cards.

Even if the average miner makes 1 block every 3 months, the payout for mining solo would still be higher than mining in a pool. Most people make around .2-.7 a day judging by block statistics on most pools. 3 months is a hell of a long time to get lucky when your miners are running 24/7. My last card (running @ 340 Mh/s) that I bought at the last difficulty found a block only a week after I bought it. It doesn't even run 24/7 as I bought it for my father in exchange for him running it during the day while he's not using it. In the end it does depend a lot on luck, but the quoted claim is simply outrageous. I would never waste even 10GH on a pool.

I wouldn't plop 10GH/s down solo. But I'm an avowed pooler, as my luck dictates I must be. I've generated about 400BTC give or take since may from pools, or 8 blocks worth. In that same time, I've generated as far as I can tell 0 actual blocks according to my statistics.  This would be a sad state of affairs to have found myself in. I for one would agree that without sufficient hashing power to ensure you see a semi-regular generation, going solo feels too risky. But I'm not a gambler.

How many GH are you running at btcpokey?

Yeah, +1 to this.  I'm running about 8.5 GH since May (when the difficulty was a measly 150K) and have made about 330 BTC.  In that time I've found 3 blocks for the pools I've been with, 2 of which I found in the first week.  So for about 2 weeks I was kicking myself for not being solo, but for the following 7 weeks I was thanking my lucky stars.  I wouldn't even consider trying going solo with under 20 GH because variance is a bitch.  It's one thing when a pool has a round that's 2 or 3x variance.  That sucks for a little while.  When a solo miner has 2 or 3x variance it could easily knock him past the next one or two difficulty jumps making it even worse.

Another benefit of pools that people completely forget is the fact that you can react to the market.  So let's take a hypothetical situation where on average you should find 1 block every week, you'd likely also make ~50 BTC a week, so say 7 a day minus fees.  Let's say 5 days into your mining the market shoots up and BTC/$ suddenly double in price.  If you are solo mining, there's a chance you have 0 BTC.  If you are pooled mining, you have 35 BTC you could sell if you'd like.

Pooled mining and the trickle of income gives you a better chance to react to market moves if you are inclined to that sort of thing.

Anyone know what the average transaction fee premium is on top of the 50btc for finding a block.
Do the pools just keep this to make their profit or take a little cream off the top so to speak?

It varies dramatically, but I'm sure the average is < 1%.  Very few transactions have any transaction fees, and as far as I know no miners require a transaction fee so it is a safe bet to not include one on transactions and they'll still be picked up in the first block

Ive made around 25 BTC so far, and generated 1 block 100% certain


I would have over twice as much BTC if started mining solo two weeks ago, rather than pooled.


But I don't really mind that much because I have yet to see how much I have made by my second block.

You wouldn't have generated that block if you were running solo.  Part of the header which is being hashed, is the merkle root which contains all the transactions including the 50 blocks which go into the pool's address.  If you were soloing, then that transaction would have been to your address, thus you would have had a completely different merkle root, and you would have had completely different results from the hashing. 

How do you know? I think that with the million+ workshares I have completed its pretty likely that I would have found a block mining solo too by now.

The answer is obvious. Since my pool is paying +5% bonus on the first 60 blocks, it is more profitable than soloing.

There's no point thinking about whether you have more or less luck and what you should do because of that. Luck is completely random. If you don't agree with this, try praying while mining - see if it helps. :)

How do I point phoenix on my linux rig to my windows machine hosting namecoind?

whenever i try to connect with the usualy -u http://user:pass@ipaddress:port it doesn't work
just says failed to connect...

Is there a log anywhere?  I do not want to mine locally I want to do it across my LAN from 2 machines.

I wouldn't say likely, remember it is all random.  The workshares represent a difficulty 1 success, so with the current difficulty you need an _average_ of 1.6 million shares before you would have generated a block.  I don't know if you would have generated one or not, hell I don't even know if you would have generated 2, or 3 or 10.  I can only speak in mathematical probabilities, which is a far cry from "knowing".

I can tell you, in the 3 weeks I was running under my own instance of pushpool, I generated around 1.5 million shares without generating a single block.  Randomness sucks.  

One other thing I do know, the specific block you generated you wouldn't have generated if you weren't in the pool.

No log that I am aware of.  If you are getting a failed to connect, the issue might be a firewall on your windows machine.  You can try adding an exception, or disabling it altogether until you can solve the problem.  Another thing you can try is to telnet to the ipaddress and port and see if it connects.

good idea i will try the telnet thing when I get home.  I already tried disabling firewall.  Am I correct in using that command though?

Yes, your -u argument formatting is correct

  In a perfect world, solo mining vs 0% fee pooled mining should be no different. However, we are not in a perfect world... Since I started mining a month ago I have woken up on 4 different occasions where my miners were idle all night due to a network outage or ddos attack on one of the pools. Solo mining is much more desirable in the sense that you control the server and you can pretty much guarantee 100% uptime, unless you forget to pay your power bill...

  With that said, I only have 800mh/s and I'm not going to risk waiting a couple months for a block so I mine in a pool. (I am solo mining namecoins at the moment) If you are are pushing over 10 gh/s though, you may want to try going solo. If you go after a pool, come up with a good method of redirecting all your cards to a different pool in the event of an outage.

poclbm now has a --backup flag where you can set a backup pool to fail over too if the primary pool is down.  Works like a champ...