Solo mine / sovereign individual

[GGfien]

I feel like I have to say this to start. I’m not trying to buy a lottery ticket and try my luck. I’m 3 years into my Bitcoin journey and after mining shitcoins with my GPU farm, I’m ready for my next step.

I don’t want to pool mine Bitcoin. I want to be a sovereign individual, buy my s9s, mine with my own node, my own software, my own VPS. I’m not expecting some YouTube video or easy answer. I know I still have a long way to go. I’m learning python now and I know some C++ .

I don’t care about electricity costs, ROI, blah blah blah. This is my life, and it makes me happy to learn; happiness and fulfillment has no ROI prerequisite to me.

Can anyone give me some good advice on what questions I should be asking? Or where I should start? Thank you

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[BitMaxz]

Why not, solo mine with a pool you can be able to mine solo with https://solo.ckpool.org/ and the best thing is you won't lose blocks compared to mining solo with your own node.
or if you don't actually want to mine on a pool then I think you can mine solo but you need to host a pool check this open-source pool below

- https://github.com/tpruvot/yiimp

Then add sha256 algo or I think it's already there just point it to your own node.

[paid2]

I do the same here, only solo mining. But I agree with what @Bitmaxz said, doing it yourself alone is very risky. Imagine you hit the block and it becomes to be orphan because of software issues...
But if you don't mind about the BTC value and just do it for the fun, you will find many ressources here in the forum which will help you a lot.

Keep us informed, this is an interesting project. An other user did a post about building your own ckpool recently, it could help you

[mikeywith]

I don’t want to pool mine Bitcoin. I want to be a sovereign individual, buy my s9s, mine with my own node, my own software, my own VPS. I’m not expecting some YouTube video or easy answer. I know I still have a long way to go. I’m learning python now and I know some C++ .

That's going to be A LOT of work, and don't get me wrong, it will be extremely difficult for a top-notch programmer, let alone someone who is still learning, but to give you a sort of a summary of what you need to write, it will be as follows.


1- You will need to write or modify an existing mining software/driver to control the S9, that will be either Cgminer or BraiinOS.
2- You will need to run your own bitcoin node software to keep up to date with the blockchain and to propagate any blocks you might find

For that, you will need to be well connected to the other major mining pools, which requires a good server/s and some good amount of money.

Keep in mind that the above open-source codes is plug and play, you will need to do a lot of modification and testing, and in the end, you will only know if your code can actually find a block after it finds one, so you could be mining forever with a piece of software that isn't capable of finding a block in the first place, but it will be a great learning experience for sure.

[DaveF]

Take a look at: https://github.com/Coleganet/Coleganet-Pool-Install
It is an installer for yiimp which has been around for years.
You will need a fairly good knowledge of linux and as others have stated a good working knowledge of BTC / crypto.

Make sure you have several fast routes to the internet for block propagation in case you find one.

Keep in mind using some quick back of the napkin math, and I'm sure others will correct me if I'm wrong with the current difficulty with 10 S9 units with average luck you should hit a block in about 30 years....

-Dave

[Husires]

AFAIK, mining software is not only concerned with the programming language, but rather with how to make optimal use of the available physical capabilities (monitor hardware temperature, detect and start idle threads).

Make a small comparison between the currently available software and you will find that CGMiner is the best for the reason mentioned above.
you must have technical knowledge of computer database, physical parts of mining equipment, and good software experience to be able to compete with current mining software.


the best what you can do is to fork opensource one and try to optimize it.

I don’t care about electricity costs, ROI, blah blah blah. This is my life, and it makes me happy to learn; happiness and fulfillment has no ROI prerequisite to me.

Can anyone give me some good advice on what questions I should be asking? Or where I should start? Thank you

Mining is a profit-based economic activity. If you don't care about electricity costs, you may end up wasting thousands of dollars trying to build something.

[cryptoathtalker]

Well, the truth is that I feel the same as you, so I will limit myself to following your post to get recommendations.

[nullama]

I feel like I have to say this to start. I’m not trying to buy a lottery ticket and try my luck. I’m 3 years into my Bitcoin journey and after mining shitcoins with my GPU farm, I’m ready for my next step.

I don’t want to pool mine Bitcoin. I want to be a sovereign individual, buy my s9s, mine with my own node, my own software, my own VPS. I’m not expecting some YouTube video or easy answer. I know I still have a long way to go. I’m learning python now and I know some C++ .

I don’t care about electricity costs, ROI, blah blah blah. This is my life, and it makes me happy to learn; happiness and fulfillment has no ROI prerequisite to me.

Can anyone give me some good advice on what questions I should be asking? Or where I should start? Thank you

You need to learn a lot of things. Some of those are orphan blocks, and stale blocks. You don't want to have them.

It requires a lot of work to create and manage your own pool to solo mine successfully. You can start by looking at the source code of ckpool solo, available here: https://bitbucket.org/ckolivas/ckpool-solo/src/master

You might consider just joining that pool(it's not really a conventional pool), since it's basically solo mining, paid directly to your own address (minus the fee). Here's the address for that: https://solo.ckpool.org

[Morguk]

I would strongly recommend the CK solo pool.

[hZti]

If you really just care about learning then you could set up your own pool completely from scratch but its very complicated. If you just want to solo mine you could also solo mine in a solo pool that just gives you the backend so you have to simply connect your miner. Benefit of that is that you will still get the full block reward but it is much quicker to set up.

[GGfien]

I just wanted to give an update since I kinda just went AFK.

So the shitcoin event happened and I have almost sold off all my hardware. It feels amazing not supporting that unregulated security. I feel guilty, dirty for mining those coins and selling them to people but idk what to say... I guess in todays space, everyone goes through their shitcoin phase; glad to be out of mine.

I am going to buy an antminer S9 and start working on this...
here is my goal and why I am doing this:

There should be an open source mining software on Github anyone can fork to be fully sovereign and mine to their own node. I do not have the skills to build that, but I will eventually as long as every week I make one step in that direction and don't give up.

Yeah, it would suck if I had an orphan block I guess. But doesn't every miner, even pools, have the same luck? Why would a large pool fork after I find a valid nonce rather than build on this chain? It seems illogical that this would happen. UNLESS, I found a block at the literal same time as another pool and the pools are in their own consensus to help each other by beating my block out by building on the chain the pool contributed to. Nonetheless, this is still a risk for the pools in this little make shift alliance. What happens when two of them find a block at the same time? At the end of the day, blocks are blocks, nonce is a nonce, consensus is consensus; it's all luck no matter how we slice it.

I plan to fork my own BTC to test my get block code to test and see how it performs. Yeah, it isn't the same as being on the network, but at least this lets me see if I can even run a "get block" command.

I fully, in my heart and soul feel like you should be able to click a button in Bitcoin Core that says "start mining", and begin mining with your own full node. YES, it is largely impractical. YES, it won't matter to one single user. But I consider it like going to vote. Will my vote make a difference, probably not; but I still spend my time and resources to vote because I care about democracy (or what little of it we have left in North America).

If everyone used their computers and little piss ant miners to mine, it would largely help Bitcoin as a network and give the community a sense of pride knowing they are doing their part.

[nullama]

~snip~
There should be an open source mining software on Github anyone can fork to be fully sovereign and mine to their own node. I do not have the skills to build that, but I will eventually as long as every week I make one step in that direction and don't give up.

In the early days you could literally just download Bitcoin (called Bitcoin Core now) and click "Generate Coins" and it would solo CPU mine without any pools.

Later, you could use cgminer or bfgminer to solo mine without connecting to a pool.

Over time, it got really competitive, and the idea of solo mining in main net slowly faded away and most people use a pool to avoid things like orphan blocks.

But since you want to ignore this advice, you can still use cgminer and bfgminer today to solo mine without connecting to a pool. I made guides about how to do it for testnet, which makes sense since those coins are worth nothing:

[Guide] Solo mine testnet bitcoins with cgminer, Bitcoin Core, and a Compac F
[Guide] Solo mine testnet bitcoins with bfgminer, Bitcoin Core, and a CPU/GPU

You could simply change the relevant parts and make it work for your miner, in main net.

Again, it would be a shame to actually solo mine a block and then lose it because you don't have your machine well connected, but you can definitely solo mine without a pool today.

[DaveF]

There should be an open source mining software on Github anyone can fork to be fully sovereign and mine to their own node.

There are several options.
https://github.com/jtoomim/p2pool    Once it's installed and running you can tweak a few settings and it will not connect to any other p2pool nodes so you would be solo mining
https://github.com/tpruvot/yiimp    As BitMaxz mentioned, also take a look at my above post for an installer
https://bitbucket.org/ckolivas/ckpool/src/master/    CKpool

There are a few others out there too, but for your own solo pool there really is no need to code it yourself.
Keep in mind, you will need a network connection with low latency. That is really more important then speed. And obviously, do testing on testnet before going live.

-Dave

[netghost]

I did actually get this to work but that was before taproot. AFAIK the bitcoin core no longer accepts GBT connections. I was able to do it with an older version of bitcoin core that did allow it.

I purely did it to see if I could. Nothing interesting happens cgminer reports a line every few seconds and that's about it. I had scratched that itch so moved on after about 10 minutes of watching.

It wasn't worth the effort to be honest. But was a rainy day and took a few hours of it away.

Oh and if you are tempted to patch bitcoin-core to get GBT working make damned sure you are on TESTNET.

Cheers.

[Queentoshi]

I want to be a sovereign individual, buy my s9s, mine with my own node, my own software, my own VPS. I’m not expecting some YouTube video or easy answer. I know I still have a long way to go. I’m learning python now and I know some C++.

It is a very bold move you are making, wanting to take up all the responsibility and burden that come with solo mining, many people often do not take this path knowing that it may become a while before they get any profit. You have already been told about the amount of work that you are wanting to carry, it won't be easy, but it can be worth it. I don't think that there are many solo miners, the few ones likely are not regretting their decision to take that path.

[nullama]

Btw, is it possible to solo mine Bitcoin? Curious

Of course you can.

Here are some options if you want a proper, well connected pool:

https://solo.ckpool.org

http://www.kano.is/index.php?k=soloinfo