Heh, maybe I should consider solo mining.

[os2sam]

Saw a post earlier today and the person said

"Heh, maybe I should consider solo mining."

Is there a solo mining program that uses a GPU?  The only two I have found so far only do CPU mining.
Thanks,
Sam

[neco]

If you run the bitcoin client with the -server flag, you can connect to it like you would with a mining pool.

[icolsuineg]

Solo mining is unacceptable for those with less than quite a few GH/s... except if you don't like it to sit and wait forever for nothing

[os2sam]

Really?  That would be nice to have in the readme file or wiki.  Thanks for the info.  Can both, the server and the miner be run on the same machine?

Something more to tinker with when my GPU comes in.
Thanks,
Sam

[nux]

You can run the bitcoind with -daemon flag.

From there you can run bitcoind help to get list of commands, but one of them is:

bitcoind setgenerate true

You can also point poclbml.py or whatever mining application you have at the bitcoind instance to mine solo.

[nosfera2]

What icolsuineg said. Solo mining is a lottery in the sense that you might get a whole block of 50 BTC on your first day if you are extremely lucky, or you could end up mining for weeks and months without seeing a thing.

[os2sam]

icolsuineg,
I understand the ramifications of solo mining.  It may be unlikely that it may bear any serious fruit.  But there is a certain amount of randomness as to who will solve the puzzle.

My thoughts are that if you have a machine running full time anyway why not solo mine on it as well?  It would seem to me that consistency could be as important as TH/s.  I would hesitate to say that it's useless.

That said I'm not very happy with the removal of coin generation from the 0.3.22 client with no notice of it on the web site nor the readme file.  I think removing that ability removes people that have limited technical aptitude from being involved with BitCoin and will slow down it's acceptance.

My 0.02 BTC worth ,
Thanks for the input though,
Sam

[fisheye]

icolsuineg,
I understand the ramifications of solo mining.  It may be unlikely that it may bear any serious fruit.  But there is a certain amount of randomness as to who will solve the puzzle.

My thoughts are that if you have a machine running full time anyway why not solo mine on it as well?  It would seem to me that consistency could be as important as TH/s.  I would hesitate to say that it's useless.

well, why mine solo and possibly not get anything for months when you can join a pool and get a fairly steady payout? even if the pc is going to be running 24/7 anyway, mining does cause additional heat and power consumption since the GPU will be running at 100% instead of mostly idle.

[Oldminer]

Yea its like a lottery. You may get lucky and mine 50 BTC on your first day. It might take you a year. But averaged out against someone pool mining your gonna earn the same amount of money over any given period of time.

[os2sam]

I don't disagree with your points about solo vs. pools and CPU vs. GPU.

I just think a person should be allowed to make that decision for themselves as opposed to the capability being taken out of the bitcoin client without documentation saying so.  Also I like tinkering around with different configurations and what not.  At the moment I don't have a machine with a GPU so I can't do any high end mining.

I do have a firewall (ASG) machine running full time and thought it would be a good candidate to put a mining program on it just to what would happen over time.

Just kicking ideas around.
Sam

[Wizard-Ninja]

As long as you don't need steady payouts, there's no real reason not to. Pools are kinda a hassle. Never know when they decide to raise fees, or something else annoying.

-Wizard-Ninja-

[swusc2]

Also if you plan to lose money I guess they shouldn't have removed CPU mining from Bitcoin client. There is no general purpose CPU that produces enough Mhash/per Watt to not lose money. But if you aren't paying for electricity then there are multiple clients you can download that support CPU mining.

[os2sam]

Also if you plan to lose money I guess they shouldn't have removed CPU mining from Bitcoin client. There is no general purpose CPU that produces enough Mhash/per Watt to not lose money. But if you aren't paying for electricity then there are multiple clients you can download that support CPU mining.

swusc2 and others,
Are you mining for profit at the current value of BTC?  The price is very volatile so it is hard to calculate your actual profit margin, unless you are selling your Bitcoin immediately and adjusting your mining process according to that value.

I'm taking  more of a long term approach.  If Bitcoin is here to stay then down the road the value will be much more than it is now and may be the only currency of value in the future, since it has a quantitiy cap.

Especially the way current governments are going willy nilly spending their/our national currency as fast as it can be printed which inflates the cost's of all goods and services.

So I'm not too concerned with cost of mining, at this point, as I see it as a long term investment.  Right now I just tinkering with the different miners and pools and will eventually settle on a system(s) that have a higher hash rate, provided I decide to pursue this.
Again my 2 cents worth,
Sam

[Joker007]

Soloing mine will take weeks to years if you are mining under Ghash/s.

Keep in reminder, the difficult mining changes every 2024 blocks. Thus more time to find a block. As we're getting close to 21 million, it will be extremely hard to find. Mining is a short term investment, not long term.

[os2sam]

Soloing mine will take weeks to years if you are mining under Ghash/s.

Keep in reminder, the difficult mining changes every 2024 blocks. Thus more time to find a block. As we're getting close to 21 million, it will be extremely hard to find. Mining is a short term investment, not long term.

Mining to get allot of BitCoin may be a shortish term thing.  But having BitCoin and keeping it, as an investment, is a long term thing, provided that it does get adopted and increases in value.

Also we are no where near the 21 Million mark.  10.5 Million is supposed to be generated in the first 4 year's, and I believe we are in the 2nd year.
Sam

[dhall]

I would definitely advise the use of a pool. While the idea of getting 50 btc in one fell swoop might seem pretty attractive, right now you have fairly low odds of achieving it by yourself and those odds will only shrink in the future.

For every 500 Mhash you control, you have a 1 in 30,000 chance every 10 minutes of finding a block. As more and more mining rigs are started up, those odds will shrink drastically. The network has almost doubled in computing power in just the last week.

[tom3434]

Will the mining come to a end eventually? I mean is there a limit on how much bitcoin can be created?

[kuloch]

Will the mining come to a end eventually? I mean is there a limit on how much bitcoin can be created?

21 million BTC (or a hair under that) is the max that can ever exist.  The network is designed to keep a steady "found" rate, so that we don't suddenly run out.  And the payout rate halves every 4 years or so.

I highly recommend spending a few minutes reading some of the basic info linked in step 1 of the Beginner's Guide.

[icolsuineg]

icolsuineg,
I understand the ramifications of solo mining.  It may be unlikely that it may bear any serious fruit.  But there is a certain amount of randomness as to who will solve the puzzle.

My thoughts are that if you have a machine running full time anyway why not solo mine on it as well?  It would seem to me that consistency could be as important as TH/s.  I would hesitate to say that it's useless.

That said I'm not very happy with the removal of coin generation from the 0.3.22 client with no notice of it on the web site nor the readme file.  I think removing that ability removes people that have limited technical aptitude from being involved with BitCoin and will slow down it's acceptance.

My 0.02 BTC worth ,
Thanks for the input though,
Sam

Well, you have two options, you pick one:
1. You try to solve a block with verry little power, hoping you will get small block and get lucky. (and Luck it is, sometimes Bad one)
2. You enter a pool and get almost or absolutely constant earnings from your hardware.

Now, we did both in one with some guys at our forum - we made a pool, got 54k block solved, then the next one... well, lets say I'm on it for over 150 hours with over 35 GH/s at the beginning (most people dropped so now it is 13 GH/s) and we still haven't solved it. As I said - it's luck, first time big one, then very bad one.