No.

Bitcoin is mined with dedicated hardware called ASICs these days ONLY and not regular PC hardware, and this software is only used to drive ASICs.

That just means blockchain.info was originally looking at the wrong fork that then ended up losing the orphan race to see which block eventually became labelled as valid.

Unless it's faulty, any hardware whatsoever can find a block. It doesn't matter what it is, only total hashes matter as I originally said.

Using core with a pruned blockchain it can be as small as 550MB. There is no need to have the whole 120GB to still derive the benefits of using the core client.

The core client gives you an estimate of how many blocks it will take to confirm your transaction and allows you the option of changing the fee to speed it up to a faster estimate.

You already posted and I moved it to services where it belongs.
/locked

Nothing to do with mining which is proceeding smoothly. Continue your discussion here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1762690.0
/locked

Many of these done in the past have even announced their intent and they were mostly political and rarely technical, but never financial; no doubt this one is something about block size again.

I maintain two private gits of ckpool, one for the solo ckpool which includes code that I do not plan to make public as it is the only thing that separates solo ckpool from any other. The other private git has code that is funded privately from a BitmainWarranty representative but all the code eventually gets pushed upstream to the master ckpool git.

As Kano said, ckdb support for this project is now in limbo as it currently has no maintainer. He had intimated his dissatisfaction with my contribution to his pool and that he would no longer be upstreaming his ckdb changes to the master git so it seemed inappropriate for him to have write access to the ckpool git any more. Once I revoked that it led to a cascade of events with him rage quitting the #ckpool IRC channel which implied to me he no longer wanted to have anything to do with me and my projects so I revoked his IRC channel operator and cgminer access as well. Should he wish to continue contributing I would reinstate his write access but he said he wouldn't upstream his code anyway and I doubt he wants to contribute to my projects any more since I've effectively not been contributing to his and I suspect he harbours an awful lot of ill will towards me now.

You're right, it appears to be another concerted spam effort rather than real transactions though.
This graph is telling:
http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/transactions

Likely another political stunt.

I'd say solo mining has been ridiculous odds for years so it's really nothing different on that front; it's still a gamble - high risk for potentially high rewards (and a little exciting too.)
It doesn't matter how you spread out your hashing, your chance of finding a block is simply related to the total hashes. However as Mike pointed out
This is the main risk you take if you spread your hashes beyond the current difficulty period, and diff will continue to rise for some time yet.

Solo mining with cgminer requires you to add a --btc-address parameter for it to work, which is not normally set anywhere in the antminer configuration webpage but you can tag it on as extra parameters. However bitmain's cgminer fork is based on an outdated 2.5 year old partially broken version of cgminer that probably doesn't work properly with solo mining. Additionally the controller hardware in the antminers is very low powered and probably wouldn't be able to sustain reasonable hashrate solo mining.

You can either set up your own solo mining pool with ckpool or, by far the easiest way, is to point your hashes at solo.ckpool.org which also will dramatically decrease your chances of losing blocks as orphans.

You're welcome. Since I don't have one I'm relying entirely on the assurance from the code submitter that it actually works. All I could do was confirm it didn't interfere with existing similar devices that I own.

New release: Version 4.10.0 - 23rd January 2017

http://ck.kolivas.org/apps/cgminer/

Lots of driver updates and numerous accumulated fixes and improvements.


Human readable changelog:

The very short version:
Avalon 4/5/6/7 support
Compac gekko support
Solo mining segwit support
Updated build to use system libusb
Updated build to latest jansson library
Lots of low level fixes and reliability improvements
Pool failover handling improvements
Diff handling improvements
Extra block change information
Other configuration options
See full changelog for unlisted items.


Full changelog:

- Silence warning.
- Clean up compac driver.
- Allocate appropriate memory size for PSECURITY_DESCRIPTOR
- Remove jansson memory tricks.
- Increase header size for gbt solo.
- Increase header size.
- Fix curl build on mingw
- Windows build fixes.
- Fix avalon4 warnings.
- We can only change diff once per notify so assume successive diffs are stacked
for successive notifies.
- Enable avalon4 building with avalon7.
- Move to system libusb.
- Upgrade to jansson 2.9
- display restart thread errno
- String length sanity checks in config parsing.
- Make pool_no and block height logging more consistent
- Always clean swork when prev_hash changes
- Add nonce mask to api for Avalon7
- Add new options for Avalon7
- Add a device table for Avalon7
- Update AVA7_DEFAULT_MINER_CNT usage
- Add frequency range support 100MHz - 500MHz
- Added roll_work_ntime() to enchance performance
- Revert "Set default ava7 nonce mask to 27 which empiric testing shows stable
and more rapid rise in frequency without significant overshoot."
- Remove useless code in avalon7
- Detect avalon7 modules during ava7 init and only add the device if any modules
exist.
- Unplug avalon7 on failing to re-init AUC to allow a clean hotplug event which
is more reliable.
- Fix warning without ava4/7
- Re-initialise libusb if there are no active devices before the next hotplug
event.
- Reset the tv_end variable before each libusb handle events call.
- Fix Vo display for A741
- Update AVA7_DEFAULT_ASIC_MAX for A741
- Tweak ava7 fan control further.
- Set default ava7 nonce mask to 27 which empiric testing shows stable and more
rapid rise in frequency without significant overshoot.
- Set ava7 starting fan to 1/3 speed between min and max.
- Convert the avalon7 fan control to use a PID-like feedback mechanism for
optimal fan speed and quasi-constant temperature. Change meaning of target
temperature to actual desired temperature, setting it to 90C. Set minimum
fanspeed to 5% as a safety fallback.
- Inherit the diff from the original stratum in submit_nonce2_nonce, fixing
wrong diff submits on avalon6/7.
- Use diff1 and diff rejected to calculate hashrate in avalon7 for a more stable
displayed hashrate.
- Check for nodev errors after usb transfers to not change the err value.
- There is no need for complicated locking in usb_reset; simply use the write
lock and avoid locking risks.
- Update nonce mask from 31 to 29
- Send jobid when it's update
- Flush useless works when new block was found
- Update error polling count
- Fix frequency mode for Avalon7
- Added connection overload detection and API entry
- Fixed some English mistakes
- Fix display mm status when stratum pool is failed
- Update api display
- Reset usb devices if they fail to initialise.
- TIMER_ABSTIME is not available on osx
- Get rid of binary stratum work based on avalon7 define.
- Remove impossible comparisons from avalon7.c
- Style police.
- Don't use the stratum work generator for Avalon7
- Add STRATUM_USER_AGENT macro for utils
- Update README and ASIC-README for Avalon7
- Add Avalon7 support
- Fix warning in AV4 driver
- Update AVA4_DEFAULT_MODULARS
- Update nonce2 start and range
- Add more options for AVA4_FREQ_TEMPADJ_MODE
- Double check data size when use avalon4_auc_xfer
- Update AVA4_MM60_TEMP_FREQADJ
- Fix xfer_err_cnt
- Avoid thread block when use AV4 iic driver
- Update check rules for AUC
- Support AV4 miner detect through iic
- Fix some settings for AvalonMiner 6.0
- advertise segwit support for solo mining
- add support for segwit commitment insertion
- add bip9 support
- Fix work update for hash_work
- Fix various minor once-off memory leaks
- Fix read beyond stack size issue
- Reattach kernel driver to correct IF
- Fix clobbered by ‘longjmp’ or ‘vfork’ warning
- Fix unreachable code
- allow for independent target freq so bad stick doesn't effect group
- +1 freq hex alignment
- tidy up naming to match general conventions
- tidy up some unused vars
- Add in ramp code. Untie compac detect from default icarus fallback detect to
have a cleaner device detect path.
- move over code to fit serial number on screen
- changed a few spaces to tabs
- Added GekkoScience Compac detection and support to the icarus driver.
- Show Current Block Version under pools api
- Show Current Block Height under pools api
- Update avalon4 options
- Update AVA4_DEFAULT_SMART_SPEED to AVA4_DEFAULT_SMARTSPEED_MODE3
- Update avalon4_update process
- Code cleanup
- Minor update
- Detach the duplicate dev when detect in xfer
- Update mm count when scan hash
- Check module if exits when detect
- Update hashmeter for avalon devs
- Fix i_5s usage
- Update smart frequency for AVA4_DEFAULT_SMARTSPEED_MODE3
- Add new smart speed mode (mode 3)
- Update default value
- Add more options for smartspeed
- Don't label threads of devices that are paused as sick
- Set avalon4 to cut off if thread should be paused
- ASIC-README: Avalon6 will come up as AV6
- Update the ASIC-README and help message of Avalon4/4.1/6
- fix cgminer-api compilation on osx
- Support low diffs like those on testnets
- Restart being missed outside of block change
- Set default frequencies for ava4/6 in the correct place if none is specified
- Use a generic zero stats function for drivers that don't implement their own
- The fan control for ava6 overshoots often so use a safer non-linear curve
mechanism relative to the target temperature and remove inappropriate caps to
opt_avalon4_overheat and opt_avalon4_temp_target
- 450 would appear to be the most reliable startup speed for ava6 so revise it
down further
- Avoid double locking when checking if a block exists to prevent a further race
between seeing it and adding it
- AVA6 is more reliable starting up at the slightly slower speed of 470, making
it internally start at 450 before working its way up
- Set the freq array variables when setting default frequency as well
- Set default frequency according to ava type if none is specified on the
command line, choosing 475 as default for ava6
- Use AV6 name for avalon6 in ava4 driver
- Update copyright notices for ava4 driver
- Fix warnings
- Log blockheight when the pool changes to a new block.
- Check for stratum clean message in test_work_current to not give false
positive messages for missed pool notifications of block changes
- Update AVA4_DEFAULT_SPEED_ERROR
- Add new option for Avalon6
- Update frequency process
- Update AVA4_DEFAULT_TEMP_TARGET for Avalon6
- Update voltage decode for Avalon6
- Update temperature target and overheat
- Update target temp settting
- Update fan adjust
- Update Vol api display
- Update avalon4 option
- Display stratum difficulty in pool api
- Fix divide by zero
- Fix nonce counter
- Fix GHS display
- Display total asics for Avalon6
- Update max diff for Avalon4 and Avalon6
- Update temperature check
- Fix typo
- By default we enable automatic frequency
- Minor changes
- Update display
- Update api display
- Fix GHSmm
- Update api for Avalon6
- Display pll infomation for Avalon6
- Update frequency for Avalon6
- Turn on avalon6 nonce check as default
- Update convert voltage
- Update voltage display
- Display more status
- Enable adjust frequency automatically
- Update convert voltage
- Update temperature display for Avalon6
- Add more options for Avalon6
- Update asic count for Avalon6
- Update hashrate counter
- Decode voltage and temperature for Avalon6
- Support error code for Avalon6
- Support 2 miners for Avalon6
- Show ASCI status for Avalon6
- Don't need config voltage for Avalon6
- Update MM60 profile
- Add nonce counter for Avalon6
- Hide MW for Avalon6.0
- Count hw for Avalon6
- Increse stat buffer size
- Fix job_idcmp when copy stratum
- Add Avalon6 support
- Apply immediately the first set_difficulty
- store the next difficulty
- Make pool fallback time configurable and default to 2 minutes instead of 5.
Rework fallback mechanism to check pool status every 5 seconds and not miss a
recovering pool.
- Fix error message for pools such as p2pool that use no nonce1 in their stratum
templates
- Set work delay to 1 for AntS1 and AntS2
- driver-bitmain default tempoverctrl off so it can be disabled
- API add Work Difficulty to pools
- remove some documention references to getwork
- Support multiple modulars frequency setting
- Decode frequency for Avalon nano 2.0
- Decode adc status for Avalon nano 2.0
- Display temperature in api (Avalon nano 2.0
- Display asic match works for Avalon5
- Support adjust frequency by asics
- Display asic freq in status
- Diplay moving average dh for Avalon5
- Fix api display
- Upgrade date/timestamp strings to millisecond accuracy
- Support voltage adjustment automatically by modular
- Support Avalon5
- Increase AVAM_DEFAULT_ADJ_INTERVAL
- Boundary check
- Update AVAM_DEFAULT_VOLTAGE_MIN
- Check the final freq
- Support frequency adjust automatically
- Add simple moving sum of the hardware errors
- Add elapsed info for Avalon miner
- Advise against building blockerupter driver
- Move blockerupter driver to after icarus to not interfere with their detection
if built in

All complete, mine on!

Core wallet hasn't had the ability to mine in many many years, but then you could just be trying to raise your post count.

A reminder if you're looking at the total accepted shares at the pool at the moment, it did not properly reset on the last block found so there are 754G extra shares there. As you know, though, the last block found time is not a predictor of when the next block will be found, but I know people still like looking at the numbers (and some people think they can gleam something useful from them.)

Given that there is still massive amounts of unused capacity in the standard litecoin blockchain, there is zero reason to believe that adding more scaling options at this point to litecoin will make people jump from bitcoin.

GUIMiner is unmaintained software from an era when bitcoin was mined by your computer. These days bitcoin is mined with dedicated mining hardware called ASICs. You cannot meaningfully mine bitcoin with a computer by itself; the ASIC hardware is trillions of times more efficient than computers by themselves so you actually will end up using lots of power on your computer for nothing since you won't even earn one cent bitcoin mining for a whole year with GUIminer in the modern era.

Please don't quote entire posts for no good reason.

Read the part I left in the quote very carefully. I have no idea where you got "accepted 14.4" BTC from; there's no such measurement or accounting response from this solo pool.