How to Mine Solo?

[st4rdust]

I've looked all over for information on how to do this but surprisingly there isn't much information on solo mining aside from deterrents saying what a waste of time it is. For those of us who want to play the lottery, how does one set up miners to solo? Instead of a mining pool's host address and port, and your username and password, what replaces all of that server info with solo info?

[1714942856]

1714942856

[Nobu]

You have to run bitcoind with some settings for a username and password, and set your miner to connect to localhost (or 127.0.0.1) with that username and password.

Alternatively, you can run bitcoin or bitcoind with a flag telling it to mine coins itself, but I don't know how efficient it is.

I think there are more detailed instructions on the bitcoin wiki, but I can't remember where, at the moment. You could try running bitcoin with the --help (or possibly /help, if you're on Windows) flag in a terminal/command prompt, and it should tell you all the options and what they're for.

[r3v3rs3]

Get some machine running bitcoind/namecoind and put something like this in your bitcoind.conf:

rpcuser=user
rpcpassword=pw
rpcport=8332
rpcallowip=[put your miner's IPs/ranges here]
daemon=1
server=1

rpcuser and rpcpassword ofc have to be changed.

After dl'ing the blockchain, point your workers to the server's address using the username and password specified in your bitcoind.conf.

Example using phoenix/linux:

python phoenix.py -u http://rpcuser:rpcpw@server:port -k yourkernel DEVICE=x [additional flags]

btw. by using bitcoind's "generate coins" stuff, you're basically heating your room (aka CPU-mining).

[SimplePanda]

This has been said many times around the forums but basically unless you're going to throw a few GHash at the problem (multiple boxes with multiple modern GPU's) solo mining is probably not going to be profitable.

UNLESS...

a) You don't care how long it takes you just want the 50BTC for pride reasons.
b) You are happy depending on luck, as really this is what you're going to be using...
c) Your power is included with your rent (or you live with your parents / in a college form, etc). Mining draws power and mining solo with low hash rate likely means you'll burn more power than you'll generate in BTC. At the very least any value in BTC you generated will be reduced by your input power costs.

[deepceleron]

This has been said many times around the forums but basically unless you're going to throw a few GHash at the problem (multiple boxes with multiple modern GPU's) solo mining is probably not going to be profitable.

It is profitable, more so than mining in a pool, since even no-fee pools keep the transaction fees won. You just have to think very long term!