Solo mining without bitcoin-qt/bitcoind

[somebody314]

Hello,

I want to practice solo mining (I know about the differences between solo/pool mining but I have chosen this type for some reason).
My problem is that bitcoin client takes a lifetime to download the blockchain. It is about 5 days and I have got 186K/240K of blocks. Sometimes no new block is downloaded for one minute! It is really frustrating 

My question is that: Is there a way to do solo-mining without needing to download the whole blockchain?

[somebody314]

Why? Could you please justify your argument?

[acne]

Solo mining is great

[DeathAndTaxes]

Simple answer ... you can't.

Mining isn't some game where you get free coniz.  It serves a purpose.  Miners validate transactions and then hash them into blocks thus forming an irrevocable history of spends.  Miners prevent double spends and help the network acheive consensus when nodes are conflicted on what is the correct version of a transaction.  This is simply impossible without a full copy of the blockchain.  

It has been reported that having the blockchain on an SSD (for faster reads/writes) and having a decent amount of memory (to avoid need to pull UXTO from disk) improves bootsrapping performance.  Given memory and SSD are relatively cheap now anyone looking to run a full node should at least consider those upgrades.  Bootstrapping the blockchain from the genesis block takes a while (about 13 hours in the last test using a highly connected server with both SSD and lots of RAM) but once updated if you keep your node running 24/7 the memory, bandwidth, and I/O requirements are modest.

[acne]

Simple answer ... you can't.

Mining isn't some game where you get free coniz.  It serves a purpose.  Miners validate transactions and then hash them into blocks thus forming an irrevocable history of spends.  Miners prevent double spends and help the network acheive consensus when nodes are conflicted on what is the correct version of a transaction.

This is simply impossible without a full copy of the blockchain.  I have found that having the blockchain on an SSD (for faster reads/writes) and a decent amount of memory (to avoid need to pull UXTO from disk) improves bootsrapping performance.

Downloading the blockchain takes a long time but once updated if you keep your node running 24/7 it is trivial to stay up to date.

Just about to say this, its imposible and cannot be done.

[J35st3r]

Hello,
I want to practice solo mining (I know about the differences between solo/pool mining but I have chosen this type for some reason).

Seems to be a common question, second one today. In short don't. Unless you're running in the high Gigahash range, you'll take far too long to find a block (roughly one per day month at 50GHash/sec, scale yours appropriately), and you'll risk it being orphaned (no money!!) unless your bitcoind is well connected to the right peers (ie the other pools).