HELP: Setting up solo mining pool on my own BTC node

[glapril]

Hey guys, here is my current set up:

 - Raspberry pi 5 8gb with a 2tb nvme
 - OS: Pi OS full desktop version
 - Bitcoin Core fully synced
 - A gamma 601 that is solo/lottery mining through ckpool

What I would like to do is to set up a solo mining pool on the Pi OS, so I can mine directly to my own node. I've tried setting up ckpool with no success, I couldn't find a working tutorial on Google. I read somewhere that p2pool.in can work with Pi OS, but unsure how legit it is...

Any suggestions or help would be much appreciated.

p.s. I know umbrelOS is the easy way out, since they have bitcoin core and public pool in their app store. I do want to learn how to do this on Pi OS though.

[Nexus9090]

The question on my mind is, why would you want to?

Just use solo.ckpool.org or eusolo.ckpool.org and if you're not keen on that try https://solo.braiins.com

If its just a technical exercise to learn how to do it. I'd say, stick with learning how to build the CKPOOL code locally to your PI its not that difficult just requires some perseverence installing the required environment and build tools and reading the available manuals and readme info.

CKPOOL code can be downloaded here along with the instructions to build it https://bitbucket.org/ckolivas/ckpool/src/master/  for configuration RTFM!

Installation and set-up of bitcoin core is reasonably well documented so that shouldn't be an issue for you and there's quite a few threads on this forum on how to set-up the config files for it.

I've run bitcoincore on a PI 5 8GB with external storage in the past so its doable, though resource intensive in terms of both internet connectivity, storage and memory usage not to mention very slow to sync.

If your internet provider caps your data usage, expect a big bill as the block chain is huge ~700Gbytes

You'll need a fast external SSD or the SSD kit for PI5 to set-up bitcoin core and depending on your internet connection around 2-3 days for it to sync the blockchain. Lots of storage is required so it'll break if you try and do it on anything too small a 2-4TB SSD would be ok.

If thats all too much effort then stick with one of the many free pool providers.

Good luck.

[ABCbits]

What I would like to do is to set up a solo mining pool on the Pi OS, so I can mine directly to my own node. I've tried setting up ckpool with no success, I couldn't find a working tutorial on Google. I read somewhere that p2pool.in can work with Pi OS, but unsure how legit it is...

p.s. I know umbrelOS is the easy way out, since they have bitcoin core and public pool in their app store. I do want to learn how to do this on Pi OS though.

Have you considered installing and running self-hosted public-pool on your current OS? It's written in TypeScript, so i don't expect it depends on specific CPU architecture.

[philipma1957]

Why is that people try to move a grand piano with a small dolly?

Running solo on a rasp pi is simply wrong for a million reasons.

1)It is under powered
2)It is underpowered
3)It is underpowered
4)Speed matters you are not going to have a fast internet connection


I have  around 923.4 down and 901.3 up

my latency is 6ms

see shot below






So could you show us what you have for speed.

I simply do not walk to encourage you to do something that will almost never hit a block

and if it does has a strong chance of losing it in a speed race.

so if you are a lot slower than what I have do not try it.

point the stick to viabtc.com

set the payout to 0.001 and in a year or 2 you will have 0.001 btc which for all we know may be worth well over the 106 usd it is worth now.

[Nexus9090]

Why is that people try to move a grand piano with a small dolly?

Running solo on a rasp pi is simply wrong for a million reasons.

1)It is under powered
2)It is underpowered
3)It is underpowered
4)Speed matters you are not going to have a fast internet connection


I have  around 923.4 down and 901.3 up

my latency is 6ms

see shot below

So could you show us what you have for speed.

I simply do not walk to encourage you to do something that will almost never hit a block

and if it does has a strong chance of losing it in a speed race.

so if you are a lot slower than what I have do not try it.

point the stick to viabtc.com

set the payout to 0.001 and in a year or 2 you will have 0.001 btc which for all we know may be worth well over the 106 usd it is worth now.

Latency is a misnoma, the measurement you provide is the delay between you and the device that is carrying out the speed test. By default the machines carrying out speed tests are optimised to give the least latency and highest transfer rates, it will also be geographically located close to you.

It is not a true reflection on the performance of a miner to a pool nor is it a true reflection of how a Raspberry PI would perform.

Most of my rigs run on Raspberry PI, they have an average ping to the pool of around 20mS. Yet like you when connecting to a speed test node they show pings <10mS.

It is not a true represenation of anything.

A Raspberry PI is quite capable of running Bitcoincore and it is quite capable of running CKPOOL on top of that. The connection from Bitcoincore to the P2P network of the bitcoin infrastructure is a metric that is harder to measure since there are multiple inbound and outbound connections simultaneously. However similarly they have connectivity latency from the 10mS-100mS region depeding on where the node is situated relative to your location, since you dont get a choice in that matter, it is luck of the draw and this is true of every node on the planet.

Unless you have really poor network connectivity in general you will not notice any difference.

[glapril]

Thanks for the input guys. This whole thing is purely a personal interest - being able to run my own node and my own mining pool, and contributing to bitcoin's decentralisation.

I've got bitcoin core up and running on the pi 5 fully synced. Its' been running for a week now I see no problem with it.

The problem is, I have zero experience with coding/linux, the readme file on https://bitbucket.org/ckolivas/ckpool/src/master/ is far too hard for me to follow. I tried many tutorials on Google(chatgpt as well), none of them worked for me. I guess I will just have to mine through something like sole.ckpool

It's a bit of a shame, but hey, it's beyond my capabilities. I will keep the node running for as long as possible, it's a cool little feature on my stand:

https://ibb.co/qTWRnPr

[Nexus9090]

Thanks for the input guys. This whole thing is purely a personal interest - being able to run my own node and my own mining pool, and contributing to bitcoin's decentralisation.

I've got bitcoin core up and running on the pi 5 fully synced. Its' been running for a week now I see no problem with it.

The problem is, I have zero experience with coding/linux, the readme file on https://bitbucket.org/ckolivas/ckpool/src/master/ is far too hard for me to follow. I tried many tutorials on Google(chatgpt as well), none of them worked for me. I guess I will just have to mine through something like sole.ckpool

It's a bit of a shame, but hey, it's beyond my capabilities. I will keep the node running for as long as possible, it's a cool little feature on my stand:

CKPOOL is pretty easy to compile and get going.

When I have a few spare minutes I'll put together a step by step for you.

It took me less than 10 minutes to compile and run it the last time I tried.

Even so, its just easier to use one of the many free pools and solo.ckpool.org is one of the longest standing and trusted solo pools out there. Plus you dont have all the hassles of overheads and maintenance to worry about.

[Nexus9090]

Thanks for the input guys. This whole thing is purely a personal interest - being able to run my own node and my own mining pool, and contributing to bitcoin's decentralisation.

I've got bitcoin core up and running on the pi 5 fully synced. Its' been running for a week now I see no problem with it.

The problem is, I have zero experience with coding/linux, the readme file on https://bitbucket.org/ckolivas/ckpool/src/master/ is far too hard for me to follow. I tried many tutorials on Google(chatgpt as well), none of them worked for me. I guess I will just have to mine through something like sole.ckpool

It's a bit of a shame, but hey, it's beyond my capabilities. I will keep the node running for as long as possible, it's a cool little feature on my stand:

Quick question if I may on the Pironman 5 RaspberryPI case you have.

How noisy are the fans on it, I know the question is subjective but I was considering getting one but if its too noisy it'll not be appropriate for me. If its about wisper level quiet that'll be OK.

Thanks

G.

[Nexus9090]

Just following up on this.

I bought myself a PIRONMAN-5 MAX case and repurposed one of my PI-5's and a 2TB NVME SSD. The PI-5 I've used is only a 4GByte version.

Setting up Bitcoincore 29 took me around 10-15 minutes, sync of the blockchain took nearly 3 days.

As a side note, I compressed the data directory for offline storage to a TAR.BZ2 at max compression even after all that it is around 693.5GBytes in size, but at least in future I can use that to rebuild the chain without having to re-download the whole damn thing again. Mind you, the copy from the PI to the backup storage media took nearly 3 hours alone!

I then git cloned CKPOOL and followed the build instructions, this worked fine.

Then I spent around an hour tinkering with the ckpool.conf file to get it functional with my set-up. This was the hardest part of it.

Once that was done, I connected one of my mining rigs and away it went quite happily mining to the PI5 through Stratum to the newly configured CKPOOL on the PI5


In terms of usage stats: memory usage is hovering around 1.2-1.7GBytes

CPU usage is <2% on average.

So the PI is more than capable of running both Bitcoincore and CKPOOL as a local pool provider.

I'll follow up on this post with a more detailed configuration and step by step but for now it seems to be working just fine.