Help solo mining- anyone?

[miner49er]

OK I am pool mining and thats fine, but trying an excersize for the student here on solo mining:

I have a Win7 PC with bitcoin-Qt and guiminer. I launch guiminer and choose start client as server. I select new miner , chhose solo from dropdown and put in the UN/PW from bitcoin.conf,and....nothing. console shows wrongUN/PW then bunch of IO errors and something about no backup server found.

do I need something else in my bitcoin.conf file ?

All that contains is
rpcuser=
rpcpassword=
rpcallowip=*

do i need any extra lines in my .conf file or something?

[hashkey]

Hello n00b_miner49er, to get started on solo mining, I recommend you read section 3 / How to get started using your gpu to mine for bitcoins on windows of the Beginners Guide thread at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=9430.0. That alone is sufficient to help you go solo mining from zero to hero 

[Graet]

-server
-daemon
 
will also help you

[miner49er]

Thank You both, doing some intensive reading ...

[miner49er]

ok, somehow i got it running solo, thanks for the pointers hashkey and Graet, anyone out there want to comment on the following:

so I have the solo instance running on an old PC thast was given to me, (P.O.S.) with a Radeon 5770 i had plugged into it.
hashing about 175 Mhas/s with that one. accepted 22+ shares so far...

My main computer has 2X radeon 6870's in it and I am getting about 550 Mhash/s on those. I diverted 1 GPU to connect through my LAN to the solo server. any chance i will get lucky in the next few days before we run into the 50/25 split everyone says is coming?

here is the biggest question I have:
I have not turned on UPnP or port redirect on my router to accept incomming connections to bitcoin network, although i do have the initial 8 connections and wallet is synced; Will this hamper my ability to mine solo from this server? would I have better chances lucking out on a block if I do this?


with my wallett on the old machine, If i blow it up doing all this am i doomed to lose my coins(whopping .1 BTC)?  If this old comp does melt, and i have done the backup wallet thing using GUIMiner, will i be able to restore my wallet?

anyone care to comment, please?

[miner49er]

also, some other posts say you need to be in the giga hash range or tera hash range to actually succeed at solo mining. If my 2 machines are roughly 800-900 mhash, does that mean i am like, in the gigahash ballpark? .8 or .9 Ghash, right?

[odolvlobo]

There are more precise was to estimate the average number of days to find a block solo, but here is a quick and dirty way:

Divide 50 by the average amount of BTC you mine in a pool each day. For example, if you mine an average of 0.1 BTC each day, then you will find a block once every 500 days on average. There are only 4 days left until the reward drops. If you mine 12.5 BTC each day, then you have about a 50% chance of finding a block solo before the reward drops.

[Gabi]

also, some other posts say you need to be in the giga hash range or tera hash range to actually succeed at solo mining. If my 2 machines are roughly 800-900 mhash, does that mean i am like, in the gigahash ballpark? .8 or .9 Ghash, right?

Lol. You need enough hashing power because otherwise you find a block every year or so by solo mining. With 1ghash you find a block every 5 months on average. 

[miner49er]

ya, maybe i will go back to the ol pool..... thanks all for the comments.

what are the benefits of port redirecting to my solo machine and accepting incoming connections? I assume I run a greater risk of being hacked/scammed/infected?

are their reputable Ip's I can add, or ranges I can add for incomming connects?

[hashkey]

with my wallett on the old machine, If i blow it up doing all this am i doomed to lose my coins(whopping .1 BTC)?  If this old comp does melt, and i have done the backup wallet thing using GUIMiner, will i be able to restore my wallet?

Well, if your old comp melts, you should be able to restore your wallet given that your HDD is not busted. That's why it is important that you first encrypt your wallet with a long and strong passphrase that you are sure you will remember for future reference, then back-up this wallet on a thumb-drive or cd/dvd. Another thing is that you should backup your wallet every 100 new-key actions (from the bitcoin wiki https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Securing_your_wallet#Securing_the_Bitcoin-QT_or_bitcoind_wallet).

[niko]

also, some other posts say you need to be in the giga hash range or tera hash range to actually succeed at solo mining. If my 2 machines are roughly 800-900 mhash, does that mean i am like, in the gigahash ballpark? .8 or .9 Ghash, right?

Today's network hashrate is ~25 Thash/s. Your hashing rate may be ~1 Ghash/s. Therefore, you are entitled to approximately 0.00004 of the block rewards. Daily, there are 6*24=144 blocks mined, currently rewarding finders 144*50=7,200 coins. Therefore, your entitlement is approximately 0.000004*7,200=0.29 coins per day. To get 50 coins - an equivalent of finding one new block - you'd need to mine for 173 days. Factor in some variance. Of course, as you know, the reward will be halving in a few days from now.