love hate relationship with the pools

[brybot]

I am relatively new to the whole bitcoin thing. Got set up with a graphics card a little over a month ago and decided to go with pooled mining because statistically it was much safer if I wanted to see any returns. Especially with the rate of difficulty increase, it was very possible that I would never find a block. Pooled mining has gone pretty well and I have made a handful of bitcoins. I suppose its just my luck that I do the pooled mining and then find two blocks for the pool and end up with only a handful of bitcoins. I know that had I done solo mining I may still not have found any blocks, its all probability and I am not searching for a unique block. I'd say I have no real regrets for joining a pool, but I still can't help but wish I never found any blocks at all. Makes me wonder "what could have been" had I gone solo. But I am sure that would have just ended badly. Anyone else find themselves thinking the same thing?

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[aeroSpike]

Yes, same here.

I'm mining with slush. Found a block 3 weeks after starting with a modest 5670. Then I installed a rig with a 5850 and 5870 and found a block after 2 weeks with the 5850.
I also know this is just luck. But you can't help but think about going solo.

[teknohog]

I think I know the feeling. I have been fairly lucky with solo mining, for example, one of my GPUs once found 4 blocks in 5 days, when the expected time between blocks for that card was over 20 days. However, with the recent surge in difficulty, I have switched to pools. At the moment my favourite one is Swepool, with zero fees and a 0.5 BTC block finding bonus.

In the past I have spoken against pooled mining, because they generate extra network congestion, and they introduce centralized weaknesses in the originally pure P2P network. However, there are the obvious positive sides too.

Even for a strong miner with many Ghash/s, they give a kind of insurance: say you expect to find a block in 5 days, but your system crashes after 4 days. In this case, the work of 4 days is not wasted if you are in a pool.

[kjj]

The 4 days is not wasted either way.