HELP!! Is it possible to use old laptop for solo mine bitcoin to try some luck?

[safarnkm]

Hi guys,
             I am relatively new to bitcoin and absolutely new to bitcoin mining/any sort of mining. Although chance of success is ~0, I am trying to solo mine bitcoin using my dual core laptop with NVidia GeForce GT 740m to try my luck. I am using cgminer v3.7.2 as the mining software and bitcoin core v0.21.1. I use the following lines in bitcoin configuration file:

server=1
listen=1
daemon=1
rpcuser='xxxx'
rpcpassword='yyyy'
rpcallowip=127.0.0.1
rpcport=8332

            then run cgminer using "http://127.0.0.1:8332" as url, "xxxx" and "yyyy" as username and password. but the cgminer shows as:

[2021-07-26 16:04:49] Probing for an alive pool                                                                       
[2021-07-26 16:04:51] Pool 0 slow/down or URL or credentials invalid

anybody please help Roll Eyes

[1714822207]

1714822207

[1714822207]

1714822207

[1714822207]

1714822207

[NotFuzzyWarm]

1st, please be aware that "Bitcoin" is not a generic term for all cryptocoins. It is 1 very specific coin with the symbols of BTC or BTC, all others are what are known as altcoins (and very commonly also called crapcoins due to the vast majority of them - but NOT all - are worthless) and have their own names and symbols.

Please read this pinned link, mainly point-3. In short, what you want to do is beyond useless. Bitcoin mining requires use of ASIC-based hardware.
A good reference for starting is here.

That said, many altcoins can be mined using CPU/GPU's. The Forum has areas just for that starting here.

[safarnkm]

First of all, thanks for your reply.
  Here i am talking about bitcoin. I have read both of your reference links previously and I understand the chances of success is not extremely rare, but 99.99999999999% impossible. Still i want to try that one with my laptop which has a tdp of 15 watts. I had tried solo mining with ckpool. And it works. But even after research, i am unable to understand fully.
1.when i mine on ckpool, the pool difficulty is 10k and last day i got accepted shares of 10k. What does it mean? Please give an idea.
2. How do we know if we found a block?
  Hope someone will give me some answers

[Lafu]

First of all, thanks for your reply.
  Here i am talking about bitcoin. I have read both of your reference links previously and I understand the chances of success is not extremely rare, but 99.99999999999% impossible. Still i want to try that one with my laptop which has a tdp of 15 watts. I had tried solo mining with ckpool. And it works. But even after research, i am unable to understand fully.
1.when i mine on ckpool, the pool difficulty is 10k and last day i got accepted shares of 10k. What does it mean? Please give an idea.
2. How do we know if we found a block?
  Hope someone will give me some answers

Its still possible that you can mine with your Laptop but you will not making anywhere a big profit of it.
You will also not getting many accepted shares with your Laptop and that is mostly the most important when you mining on a pool.
So more accepted shares you have and got so more reward you will get.
The Asics will grab all the or the most shares as they have more Hashrate .

[batsonxl]

You need ASIC to mine bitcoin. with gt740m you cant mine anything these days.

[mocacinno]

you should listen to @NotFuzzyWarm, really, if you want to play the lottery, both the odds of winning, the cost of the ticket (vs the electricity price) AND the payout are much higher when playing your country's actual lottery than lotto mining with a cpu.

That being said: you asked what a share is... I'll give you the non-technical version:
Let's say the current network difficulty is 14T. A high difficulty leads to a very (very) small target (and vice versa). This means your goal (as a miner) is to find a block header who's sha256(sha256(block header)) < *the very small target*.

Now, a pool is basically a big group of people trying to solve a block together (POOLing their resources). If one member of the pool solves the block, most of the reward will be split between the pool participants. However, such a split has to happen in a fair way: if you are mining in a pool with your one CPU and i'm mining in the pool with 50 latest gen ASIC's, my share has to be thousands of times bigger than your share.
But... how does the pool know i'm actually running 50 asic's? They could ask me (but i can lie), they could force me to install some monitoring app (but i can't install apps on an ASIC, and i can also fake it's output). So the pool operator came up with a smart way of measuring how much work each pool participant delivers: shares!!!

What a pool does is setting some kind of "imaginary" difficulty... For example 14M. 14M is one million times smaller than the actual difficulty. So the target is much bigger (and you'll "solve" much more blocks at this imaginary difficulty as you'd do with the actual difficulty). This way, everybody that's mining in the pool will hit some shares once in a while and send them to the pool. The pool operator is able to verify if the share is legit and knows, on average, you had to put x amount of work into finding one share. It allows the pool operator to estimate how much hashrate you're bringing to the pool. This estimation is used to divide the block reward once a block is found.

That's basically the beginner, newbie version of what a share is... It's actually more technical and more difficult, but the above explanation should give you a basic idear.

[FP91G]

Hi guys,
             I am relatively new to bitcoin and absolutely new to bitcoin mining/any sort of mining. Although chance of success is ~0, I am trying to solo mine bitcoin using my dual core laptop with NVidia GeForce GT 740m to try my luck. I am using cgminer v3.7.2 as the mining software and bitcoin core v0.21.1. I use the following lines in bitcoin configuration file:

server=1
listen=1
daemon=1
rpcuser='xxxx'
rpcpassword='yyyy'
rpcallowip=127.0.0.1
rpcport=8332

            then run cgminer using "http://127.0.0.1:8332" as url, "xxxx" and "yyyy" as username and password. but the cgminer shows as:

[2021-07-26 16:04:49] Probing for an alive pool                                                                       
[2021-07-26 16:04:51] Pool 0 slow/down or URL or credentials invalid

anybody please help Roll Eyes

It's not even a lottery game, but a way to destroy your laptop. It makes no sense to mine something on such equipment, because you need a video card with at least 3 GB in order to mine some well-known coins.
At least read some theoretical information before you start mining and don't scoff at your old laptop.

[adaseb]

First of all, thanks for your reply.
  Here i am talking about bitcoin. I have read both of your reference links previously and I understand the chances of success is not extremely rare, but 99.99999999999% impossible. Still i want to try that one with my laptop which has a tdp of 15 watts. I had tried solo mining with ckpool. And it works. But even after research, i am unable to understand fully.
1.when i mine on ckpool, the pool difficulty is 10k and last day i got accepted shares of 10k. What does it mean? Please give an idea.
2. How do we know if we found a block?
  Hope someone will give me some answers

If you got an accepted share it means its working. Its a solo pool however when you get an accepted share it doesn't mean you found a block. The difficult is much much lower on a pool just to make sure your connection doesn't timeout since its an actual solo pool, you would never send any shares unless it was the block.

So to prevent it from timing out, they set a min difficulty to make sure you are mining. The way the difficulty works its based on your hashrate, so the lower the hashrate the lower the min difficulty so every few seconds you can send a share to the pool.

My advice, just buy a second hand old Antminer S5 ASIC for like $20 on Craigslist and practise your hobby that way. Who knows, maybe you will find a block with the S5. Or maybe try solo mining BCH instead.

[David.Jack]

BTC can do mining with Laptop but might not receive any reward due to ASIC’s high hashrate device grapes those mining rewards.

[Bitbtc8]

Getting a block solved is the main issue here, you will wait forever to see that happens so don't bother trying your luck cos it's never going to happen, get yourself a 400$ GPU and use Nicehash, you will get paid every 24hrs with BTC

[adaseb]

What’s crazy is that Satoshi probably and maybe Hal Finney they mined BTC back in 2009 with a laptop. And now it’s virtually impossible and nobody even dares to try.

Imagine mining a bunch of blocks back in 2009 with an old laptop. Forgetting about it for a decade and then later on remembering you solo mined and going crazy rummaging your basement looking for that laptop and praying that you didn’t format the drive.

[safarnkm]

Again, Thanks all for your reply and your suggestions. But again  I am not clear about why cgminer is showing server/pool0 down.
1. How can I make that work?
For your information, l have set the option to prune the verified blocks in the IBD section. Is that is the reason for pool0 down message?
2. What are the settings that need to be applied in the bitcoin core settings in order for this to work?
Looking forward to your inputs  

[Stanlo]

Hi guys,
             I am relatively new to bitcoin and absolutely new to bitcoin mining/any sort of mining. Although chance of success is ~0, I am trying to solo mine bitcoin using my dual core laptop with NVidia GeForce GT 740m to try my luck. I am using cgminer v3.7.2 as the mining software and bitcoin core v0.21.1. I use the following lines in bitcoin configuration file:

server=1
listen=1
daemon=1
rpcuser='xxxx'
rpcpassword='yyyy'
rpcallowip=127.0.0.1
rpcport=8332

            then run cgminer using "http://127.0.0.1:8332" as url, "xxxx" and "yyyy" as username and password. but the cgminer shows as:

[2021-07-26 16:04:49] Probing for an alive pool                                                                       
[2021-07-26 16:04:51] Pool 0 slow/down or URL or credentials invalid

anybody please help Roll Eyes

Don't even bother as this is a waste of time, the only thing you use that laptop to do is either sell to buy another with gtx1660 minimum or buy graphic card instead to start mining Ethereum or you can buy harddrives and use on your old laptop to farm chia coin, do research on that