solo.

[magnito]

Suppose I was doing 10,000 Mhash/sec 24/7, would it be worth doing solo mining?  Is there some sort of rule of thumb?

-Magnito

[godofal]

would it be worth it?
heh, kinda impossible to know without the hardware, and electricity bills you're gonna get

as a rule of thumb, i used this: http://bitcoinx.com/profit/index.php

[magnito]

hardware and electricity costs aside just looking at hashes per second.

-Magnito

[zaph]

Whether its worth it or not depends on what will be the value of bit coins when you try to sell them. Since no one can really predict that you may end up with bitcoins which are worthless.

If you expect the value of bitcoins to go up substantially from where it is now then it would probably be a better idea to just buy them directly.

[magnito]

Ok, what about this -- how fast will I have 50 BTC block with 10 Ghash/sec?

-Jack

[Atom]

It's probably worth your time, but the question is how much are you spending to achieve that level of power?   It also depends greatly on where you are geographically, as if you're in California with .45 cents per kilowatt hour, it's hard to justify mining.

[tito13kfm]

Ok, what about this -- how fast will I have 50 BTC block with 10 Ghash/sec?

-Jack

Somewhere between 1 second and infinity.

Average time at current difficulty is 4 days 8 hours.

From http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/old_calculator.php

[N4rk0]

Solo mining just increases variance.

[pe512]

Solo mining just increases variance.

Exactly. If you feel lucky, go for it. It could pay off, or it might not.

Aside from any fees, pooled mining just removes (most) variance from the equation.

[Clipse]

Youd allways be better off no matter your hashrate if you mine at some decent >1.5thash pool at 0% fee.

[tito13kfm]

Solo mining just increases variance.

Exactly. If you feel lucky, go for it. It could pay off, or it might not.

Aside from any fees, pooled mining just removes (most) variance from the equation.

Solo mining paid off for me with namecoin.  I found 8 blocks in 24 hours.  I should have found 2 or 3 with my rigs.  Strangely enough, all 8 blocks were found by the same card... my weakest card.. a 5830.

Gotta love the pure randomness and gambling aspect of solo mining.  That being said, I'm back to pooled BTC mining after the most recent difficulty increase with namecoins.

[zaph]

If you have some use for the hardware after mining from it becomes financially nonviable then I would say go for it!

[SlipperySlope]

The problem is that even 10,000 MH/sec is a small fraction of the largest pools such as BTCGuild.  As of this moment BTCGuild has an aggregate 2,353 GH/sec rate and discovers 40+ blocks per day.

A solo miner competes with the large pools and there is a significant chance that the solo miner will not solve a block before the next difficulty increase, whereas pool members get proportionally rewarded each time the pool solves a block.

Suppose that a solo miner could have a large enough fraction of the overall bitcoin network hashing power, say 10%, then it would be better to go solo because even the zero-fee, i.e. donation pools keep the transaction fees due to block-solvers.