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[subSTRATA]

HB!

[DeathAndTaxes]

I don't think decentralized means what you think it means.  Gold mining is far more decentralized than printing USD for example.  Is the gold supply not decentralized because every single person without skill or resources can't just dig a hole in their backyard and find gold?

Also the "everyone should solo mine" & "everyone should only use the largest 3 pools" is a false dichotomy.  What about p2pool? using smaller pools? spreading hashing power over multiple pools (it actually reduces variance)? solomine (if you understand the risks and the huge volatility in payment)?

Mining will become more and more specialized over time.  Like ANYTHING in the world to be competitive it will require more resources, capital, and skill.   Would you say webhosting is decentralized?  Is it still decentralized even though starting and operating a datacenter is beyond the capabilities of 99.9% of the planet?

Regarding ASICs, the technology exist, period.  The "good miners" not using ASICs doesn't prevent "bad miners" (govt, attackers, banks, etc) from using them.  I mean it isn't like as long as all legit miners pretend away ASICs they can't still be used to attack Bitcoin.  Using the most efficient equipment available is the only way to prevent "bad guys" from being able to cheat and force them to engage in an expensive battle of brute force.  Today lets say it takes $30M in GPUs (total cost not just GPU cost) to 51% the network, thus the network is safe unless an attacker is willing to spend tens of millions right? Of course not.  Nobody looking to spend millions would use GPU, they would spend $2M to $3M, build enough ASICs to 99% attack the network and kill Bitcoin at a fraction of the cost.  Now when the network is protected by $30M in ASICs an attacker could still 51% the network but they can't do it "on the cheap" by using superior technology.

[AmDD]

A number of people here try to discourage others from mining and suggest they invest in coins them selves rather than mine. They do this, i think, to benefit themselves. The more new miners that join the lower the profit for all miners across the network, but buying coins directly can increase their value and thus increase profit for miners... this forum (and community in general) seems to be full of scams and shady areas. Its probably best to make your own decisions and not directly listen to any single person.

[Digigami]

Ok, didn't read all of it.. but the short story is that unless you have massive amounts of hashing power, there is absolutely no point in even trying solo mining.

Take for example, say you have a single 5970 GPU, at aprox 700mh/sec. At current difficulty it will take on average the better part of a year to mine a block yourself. If you are particularly unlucky, you could mine for over 2 years and never mine a block yourself. Wasting all that electricity and time over nothing. However, if you direct that 700mh/sec towards a pool which is large enough to mine blocks regularly, you will see a small but steady income from your portion of the pools blocks.

Not many people do solo mining anymore because it is not feasible. Not many encourage or are willing to show you how to solo mine because we know that in almost every case it is pointless.  One of the largest mining operations I know of, Gigavps could probably mine solo and still make a reasonable amount of coins. For whatever reason he still mines on pools. I would suspect this is to reduce variance, but that is simply a guess..

Back when I started it made sense to solo mine, as pools were young and small, and the total network hash rate had not grown to the point where I with 8 GPU's running could still mine a block once or twice a week. Those days are long behind us now. Maybe if you are one of the lucky first few to fire up an ASIC device you could do solo before the next difficulty adjustment, but not for long once others are running similar gear.

Finally, if you really really really want to solo mine..

setup bitcoind, follow https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Running_bitcoind
be sure to setup the RPC username and password.

setup your mining program as you would for a pool, but instead of pointing it to a remote pool, set your url to 127.0.0.1 and username/password the same as your RPC setup for bitcoind.

essentially once bitcoind is up and running consider it your "solo pool"

HTH

[chrisLG]

A number of people here try to discourage others from mining and suggest they invest in coins them selves rather than mine. They do this, i think, to benefit themselves. The more new miners that join the lower the profit for all miners across the network, but buying coins directly can increase their value and thus increase profit for miners... this forum (and community in general) seems to be full of scams and shady areas. Its probably best to make your own decisions and not directly listen to any single person.

Actually I don't think that is true. Telling someone that mining is less profitable than just using the money to buy bitcoin and hold it is most likely fairly good advice:

(a) Depending on your electricity costs mining with GPU is almost everywhere a money losing operation.

(b) Telling someone to buy FPGA for about 0.72 USD / MHash/s (current BFL Single) is no good advice either with the looming release of ASICS that will turn all FPGA into very expensive paperweights. Even a BFL Single (with a very attractive MHash/s per USD ratio) will take about six months to pay for it (when considering electricity at .24€/KWh). And this is all considering the current reward. After the drop to 25 BTC/Block everything looks even worse.

(c) Promoting an investment in ASICs is also not very sound advice. Nobody knows for sure when they will be delivered, what the difficulty will be after they are delivered and whether they will be delivered at all.


Disclaimer: I am currently mining with about 1.4 GHash/s but I'm pretty sure it is going to not have a positive return on investment -- or at least a very risky investment.

[Mike Hearn]

You can sign up to p2pool to solve this problem. P2pool is not like a regular pool. It doesn't have the same centralization problems other pools have.

[Luno]

Don't worry Mr. Skydiver, help with getting your rig up and running has always been hard to get, People are helpful on specific questions, but there is also some frowning against more competition, Like asking a fellow goldminer if he knows a good spot around here. There 3-4 guides around the net on setting up a miner and pointing it to a local port with bitcoinqt running as server. If you want turnkey, boot with Bamt from an usb stick, it's really well optimised, - for pool mining. solomining is now, with standard sized GPU setup around a 60 day wait average before you find a block of 50BTC. You don't have auto reboot and email notifications with gui-miner running solo, very usefull if want to share your free time with women also.

[casascius]

Here are a few things to keep in mind.

1. P2Pool brings together all of the advantages of pool mining and all of the advantages of solo mining except for one: it requires that each miner maintain a fully functioning bitcoind, which for many adds a great deal of complexity and resource burden.  This can, should, and will change as Bitcoin evolves to stop needing the whole block chain and relying instead on a much smaller "meta tree" (or similar construct).  Right now, a big advantage to join a pool is that you can just download a live CD or bootable USB stick and be up and running quickly.  When it changes so P2Pool can work the same way, so will the distribution of mining power.

2. In my opinion, the most likely reason that so much hash power ignores the call to avoid centralized pools is that the hash power is one or a few botnets whose operators, for whatever reason, choose to use particular pool(s) as a business decision and consider decentralization a lower priority.  Remember that botnet mining is exempt from the normal economic laws that incentivize keeping expenses less than revenues, because botnet mining always shifts the economic burden to others.  So, botnet mining will continue to thrive and grow even as normal miners give up and quit due to diminishing rewards, not to mention nagging wives unappreciative of a hot and noisy and pretty much unusable room in the home.  Meanwhile, running p2pool on a botnet is more resource intensive, which represents a real threat to the health of a botnet, and therefore clearly a business decision a botnet operator is far less likely to make.

3. Most arguments that connect "greed" with rogue mining tend to come from a belief that miners somehow stand to benefit from taking over the network, as evidenced by seasonal rants by newbies who come and point out we overlooked the "fact" that all a few bad guys have to do is conspire to take over the network and then get rich off of stealing coins or from counterfeit bitcoins.  If you're actually aware that's not how it works, you should explicitly acknowledge that if you want your argument to be taken seriously.

[dancupid]

Solo mining is pointless because of Moore's law - if you are mining off a single GPU the rate of technological change will outstrip your ability to get the 50btc  bounty even once. You can calculate it today based on the equipment you have today at the current difficultly - it will report in the next year you may get 50btc if you are lucky (based on today's values). But during the next year the difficulty will increase and processing power will increase so it will take you 3 years and then 10 and then 50 years.  You may as well buy lottery tickets.
As a solo minor you will be forever chasing it, because of the increasing difficulty and the relative decreasing power of your hardware.

[dancupid]

Leave your stupid profit-oriented jibberish for those who care for profit and profit only. This forum is full of fucking retards like you, who's
attempts at being smart do nothing but drown already hard to find useful info in a sea of bullshits. People like you fail to realise the essentials.

I was just describing how it works - I don't mine myself. It's just how it is. That's how Bitcoin is.
Not sure what answer you are looking for since what you want is not the same as Bitcoin.
Try betterCoin - I've heard they've got something better.

[chrisLG]

Try betterCoin - I've heard they've got something better.

Lol.

[Stephen Gornick]

"Greed" as in "Let me buy devices (thus support their further development) which are so powerful that anyone not using them is out of race."

Those damn GPU miners are making CPU mining unprofitable.  As a result only the greedy who buy devices which are so powerful (GPUs) will be able to remain in the race.  The Bitcoin project will collapse as a result.

Oh wait, ... that would have been what you are saying with that same line of thought back around December 2010.

I suspect when "halving day" and/or ASIC shipments arrives there will be a lot of anger towards "Bitcoin".  There are a lot of people that invested a lot of money, sweat and tears into their rigs and when the time comes to put GPUs down (likely in about fifty days) there will be a lot of posts from pissed off people sharing their disgust.

Bitcoin doesn't exist to distribute currency to miners.  Bitcoin exists because the alternative is a debt-based fiat that benefits the banksters and the governments that they buy.

Bitcoin is as decentralized as it needs to be, otherwise we would be talking past-tense about it.

[gmaxwell]

2. In my opinion, the most likely reason that so much hash power ignores the call to avoid centralized pools is that the hash power is one or a few botnets whose operators, for whatever reason, choose to use particular pool(s) as a business decision and consider decentralization a lower priority.  

I've seen fairly little evidence that the botnets are especially big factors (especially since many of the pools will block them when discovered), though they're something of a factor.

There are a great deal of other factors though.  Mining is— once established— passive income. As long as their GPU keeps spitting out coin many people are not in a rush to mess with what works.

There also has been (and continues) to be a widespread misunderstanding of mining: a lot of people fervently believe that mining is like a race: the fastest wins almost always, and they expect a non-linear increase in returns from being in the biggest pool.

Some of the larger pools have used tools like google adwords to promote themselves in the past too— with high fees that smaller pools an decenteralized services can't collect they can afford more marketing and polishing work.

This subject is a concern— but we're much better off now than where we were a year ago.  And the concerns are somewhat overstating the risk. Miners can and do switch pools pretty quickly (e.g. automatically), and more recently developed miners like BFGminer have checks which can automatically detect some kinds of pool treachery. "no one here or anywhere else can prove me that dozens of computers contributing more than 51% of network processing power is better", doesn't of pols is not the same as "dozens of computers contributing more than 51% of network processing power"

[kjj]

You are an abrasive prick.  Don't worry, that just means you'll fit in well here.

First, pools don't have much hashing power.  The mining is still done by regular folks.  Also, the operators of the bigger pools tend to be true believers, very interested in the continued success of the bitcoin project.  If that changes, the people using their services will switch.

Second, solo mining is like buying lottery tickets.  For most people, it gives no return on investment.

Third, p2pool.

Fourth, that dude that was having problems with solo mining setup should have been asking for help with the specific mining software that he was using, or using different software, maybe something with a more active user community that would have been willing to help him figure it out.

Fifth, did you even read Eleuthria's reply to your question about the minimum payout?

[kjj]

First, pools don't have much hashing power.  The mining is still done by regular folks.

And?

Also, the operators of the bigger pools tend to be true believers, very interested in the continued success of the bitcoin project.  If that changes, the people using their services will switch.

Pool operators are humans, most with families. I hope you are aware what I'm trying to say.

Second, solo mining is like buying lottery tickets.  For most people, it gives no return on investment.

I don't see the investment if all it takes to start mining is to install easy to use software on a machine one is using anyway.

Third, p2pool.

Does not solve anything, really. Just compromise those few hundreds which are contributing 51% or more.

Fourth, that dude that was having problems with solo mining setup should have been asking for help with the specific mining software that he was using, or using different software, maybe something with a more active user community that would have been willing to help him figure it out.

What about maybe hundreds of people that found that same post and gave up themselves, seeing no answer for months?

Fifth, did you even read Eleuthria's reply to your question about the minimum payout?

Yes. Check my reply to his post.

I'm fully aware of your paranoia, yes.  Thing is, it doesn't matter how or why a pool would be compromised.  Pool users would react to the compromise itself.

The easy to use software is already installed.  Open your bitcoin.conf and put in generate=1 (or gen=1, or whatever, been a long time) and you are solo mining.

You seem to have no limit to the width of the circle of insiders that you consider to be critical to the safety of the system.  You say that a dozen pool operators could be attacked, and when I point out a way to widen the circle to hundreds, you say that 51% of them could be attacked.  Why not take it to the end and say that if everyone was solo mining, 51% of us could be attacked?

E has good reasons for not doing dust payouts, and as someone that has been keeping track of the blockchain size for a while, I thank him, for all of us.  If you, or anyone else, doesn't like his policies that he sets for his service, you can fuck off and find one more suited to your desires.

[Severian]

Ordinary people, those supposed to embrace Bitcoin as soon as possible, should be encouraged to become users AND solo miners.

I encourage you to solo mine. Go for it! Report back with your results.

Thanks for reading.

You're quite welcome.

[Shadow383]

Solo mining is pointless because of Moore's law - if you are mining off a single GPU the rate of technological change will outstrip your ability to get the 50btc  bounty even once. You can calculate it today based on the equipment you have today at the current difficultly - it will report in the next year you may get 50btc if you are lucky (based on today's values). But during the next year the difficulty will increase and processing power will increase so it will take you 3 years and then 10 and then 50 years.  You may as well buy lottery tickets.
As a solo minor you will be forever chasing it, because of the increasing difficulty and the relative decreasing power of your hardware.

I don't think you understand variance.
Darts at a dartboard. Someone mining on a 0% fee PPS pool and someone mining solo will tend towards exactly the same reward regardless of the long-term trajectory of difficulty. The variance is huge of course but claiming that solo mining is somehow less profitable is bullshit of the highest order.

[ildubbioso]

You have nothing interesting to say

My arguments will be taken seriously by anyone smart enough to grasp the current Bitcoin state

Most of you posting here are bigger Bitcoin enemies than all govs and bankers combined

This forum is full of fucking retards like you

I have never used it, but you've convinced me to try the ignore button. Let's try this. . . 

[Severian]

You missed the point of this whole thread. How much Bitcoins each miner earns should be ... no, MUST be secondary to integrity of Bitcoin network.

You miss the whole point of Bitcoin. The profitability of being a miner IS integral to the security and integrity of the network. The profit motive, and its ignorant cousin greed, were built into the protocol for a reason: to attract people who will add hashing power to the blockchain, no matter their intentions.

Even if the network is compromised/dominated, that eventuality was addressed in the original white paper:

If a greedy attacker is able to assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes, he would have to choose between using it to defraud people by stealing back his payments, or using it to generate new coins. He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth.

http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

The protocol was designed to make it so expensive to be greedy that even the greedy and shortsighted would be forced to be honest eventually. Will it work? No idea. I'm willing to take a risk on it as its a better idea than others that have been offered up.

[Severian]

holly grail

That's this chick:

https://twitter.com/Azsunyx

If Bitcoin freaks you out, perhaps you should just stick with Wells Fargo.