The people who made the serious cash with Bitcoin and Litecoin I reckon are the ones who built up their stash when the difficulty was extremely low and then waited for a year or so for a price rise to happen.
At what level of difficulty is scrypt solo-mining possible for 1600K/hashes? If a coin has a difficulty of say 1, could I solo mine if effectively? Is there a way to determine based on difficulty how long X amount of hashes would take to find a block?
I've been looking into playing with some source code for building an auto-switching mining pool. Does anyone know of any open source projects that already exist for an auto-switching mining pool? What is the best open source pool software (ie, the most popular platform) that pools are currently using?