When Does Solo Mining Make Sense?

[hermitagetool]

A friend and I are starting up a large mining farm.. looking to start out with 10/15 GH/s, possibly more beyond that. At what point does solo mining make sense? I could see us going as high as 25/35 GH/s, maybe even more, if solo'ing was feasible.

[tysat]

The current difficulty is 1690906.20472

Putting 15gh/s into the old calculator shows an average of 5 days, 14 hours, 29 minutes to generate a block.

[riikka]

Actually, it makes sense at any hash speed, and the question is about how long you are ready to wait for you money :-)

[hermitagetool]

Thanks. Sounds like we'd fare pretty well with enough hashing power, then.

[hmblm1245]

I would say its more of an emotional thing. You could go weeks without generating a single block and that is hard to swallow when you may have dumped 5000k into hardware. Pooled mining seems to be the safer bet and it just feels good to get a steady income rather then the spike of adrenalin when you generate that first block. I have looked for the same answer but it ends up being a personal choice.

[Soak]

A friend and I are starting up a large mining farm.. looking to start out with 10/15 GH/s, possibly more beyond that. At what point does solo mining make sense? I could see us going as high as 25/35 GH/s, maybe even more, if solo'ing was feasible.

8000000 proofs-of-work* = almost the max proofs-of-work a block require to be find with the actual difficulty (1690895.8030524). Probability: 99.118%.
4 GH/s is almost 1 proof-of-work by second (source: a pool owner).
15/4 = 3.75 proofs-of-work/second.

8000000/3.75 = 2133333 seconds maximum to find the block so: 3 weeks 3 days 16 hours 35 minutes 33 seconds.
4000000/3.75 (median) = 1066667 seconds maximum to find the block so: 1 week 5 days 8 hours 17 minutes 47 seconds.

Anyway, 62.5 BTC/month is very good. Latest price: 13.935$. 62.5*13.935 = 871$/month.

I don't know what the average proofs-of-work needed for the current difficulty sorry.

*proofs-of-work = shares if you prefer.

[Xephan]

A friend and I are starting up a large mining farm.. looking to start out with 10/15 GH/s, possibly more beyond that. At what point does solo mining make sense? I could see us going as high as 25/35 GH/s, maybe even more, if solo'ing was feasible.

For bigger pools, in the last 52 hours (from 2~3 hours ago when I updated my charts) or so, they had averaged about 0.67BTC per day per GH/s

Looking at smaller pools in the area of your target hash rate.

The bitminter pool has about 13~16Gh/s and found 1 block in the same time period, looking back to the previous block, gives them about 0.48BTC per day per GH/s assuming they found one block now.

Triplemining has about 80GH/s before the current round made many people jump, and found none in the past 4 days. But average the whole week will give them 0.36 BTC per day per GH/s.

Nofeemining has abour 34GH/s and found 1 in the past 52 hours for 0.66 BTC / day / GHs

The top pools has 81% of the network hash rates but generate 91% of the blocks, the remaining 19% average 0.27 BTC/GHs/day

While my data time is short, I believe there's a general trend that the slower the pool's (or a solo miner's) hashrate, the more likely they will be getting less than the expected mathematical BTC per GH/s. I think this is due to latencies but probably need more data to be sure.

So IMO, 10GH/s probably isn't worthwhile yet, despite the pure maths saying you can expect higher returns.

[Huesos]

Well for me I think Solo mining would make sense.Think about it at the time of this writing 1 BTC goes around 13.40 give or take.If you wait long enough to break a block(depending on what hardware you have) you'll eventually get 50 BTC which when multiplied to the current rate would be 670 USD. Now if you factor in how much 1 BTC will be valued by the time you break a block you'll get alot more than that because as we know bitcoin prices can get pretty high.But you also have to factor in alot of other variables such as the cost of the rig(Unless you happen to have one already) Electricity(Unless you don't pay it) and time(unless you don't have shit to do.

[STP]

I started wth Deepbit back in mid June and in first 2 weeks I found a block. Next day I lost one of my 2 5970's. I was down to 750 Mh/s and decided why not try solo since I was at half capacity. I was about to shut down my system for its card replacement 2 days into solo mining and I saw 5 mins earlier I generated 50 coins plus the transaction fees! I replaced the card and went back to the pool as I figured that I was lucky and pooling would just keep me that much farther ahead. I would not do solo unless I had 20Gh/s. The variance can kill you if you have a real unlucky streak.