A question about the theory of mining.

[autonomous42]

Question: Does a pool have better luck on average than a solo miner with similar hashing power?

Hypothesis: Sure, why not.

Rationale: Although they have similar hashrate, I think the pool will do better in the long run by finding more blocks. The pool likely has more discrete hashing units than the solo miner (let's say it's ASICminer). With more units doing the work, the pool can search over a larger area of possibility simultaneously whereas the solo miner can only look at one thing at a time albeit very quickly. [I guess ASICminer is its own pool of ASIC devices, but I digress].

An analogy: If you were searching for your missing friend, would it be more efficient to rustle up 1000 people with similar abilities to search around town or rent one helicopter with an infrared camera?

What do you guys think?

[crazyates]

A 9000GH/s pool and a 9000GH/s solo miner will mine about the same number of blocks. Your hypothesis is basically nothing more than a guess, your rational doesn't make sense as they supposedly have similar hashrates,  and your analogy is flawed.

[autonomous42]

A 9000GH/s pool and a 9000GH/s solo miner will mine about the same number of blocks. Your hypothesis is basically nothing more than a guess, your rational doesn't make sense as they supposedly have similar hashrates,  and your analogy is flawed.

^{[Citation needed]}

[Malawi]

The main thing about pools is that they smooth out variances and give small miners the same chance as larger operations.

If you solo-mine and you have really poor luck, you might spend a lot of time and electricity without finding anything. The pool churns trough the blocks at a much higher rate, and a block that takes long to find is just a small hiccup in the stream of blocks.

[ripple]

If you know how to pool hop you can increase your returns by finding young rounds in proportional method pools or other exploits. However most miners can't be bothered with this kind of detail. For most purposes there is little difference in the return of Pool v Solo mining other than the small percentage fee for the pool administrators between zero and five percent depending on the pool.

The analogy is a roulette wheel stake where Pool mining is like taking $1,000, splitting it into dollar bills, and then placing $1 on number 8, separately one hundred times, compared to Solo mining which would be taking the wad of crisp dollar notes and placing $1,000 on number 8 only one time.  They both have same expected return of (-1/38) -2.63%. The former strategy has less risk over a short time span and is more likely to leave you will taxi fare home at the end of the evening compared to the latter.

[crazyates]

A 9000GH/s pool and a 9000GH/s solo miner will mine about the same number of blocks. Your hypothesis is basically nothing more than a guess, your rational doesn't make sense as they supposedly have similar hashrates,  and your analogy is flawed.

Well your analogy is flawed. It's not like hunting for a missing person, where a pool has access to better resources than a solo miner. A hash is a hash, and after that, it's all numbers.

A better analogy is a a lottery that sells 100,000 tickets a day, and gets one winner a day. If you had a one person who bought 50,000 of those tickets, they would have the same "chance" as a collaboration of people who joined their funds together and bought the other 50,000 tickets, right? It's just statistics. Well if you take this lottery and keep it going every day for a month, eventually the winning tickets would be somewhat evenly split between the two parties.

[firefop]

IMO if you had the hashing power of a pool, you're better off solo mining.

Couple of reasons why.

You don't have to trust the pool op.
You don't have to pay pool fees.
You get to keep the tx fees.
You limit points of failure.

[AzureEngineer]

Hash rate is hash rate. Having two thousand 1 GH/s units does not get you more blocks than having a single 2000 GH/s unit. OP does not understand basic statistical analysis.

[autonomous42]

Hash rate is hash rate. Having two thousand 1 GH/s units does not get you more blocks than having a single 2000 GH/s unit. OP does not understand basic statistical analysis.

Yep that's probably it.