Solo Mining to my own node

[Coose365]

I've been running my own bitcoin node for a while now and got curious about how one would solo mine to their own node which is what i assumed was the norm back in the day and is the most decentralized for the network but everyone now uses pools even for solo mining.

I even recently bought an old crappy S9 from eBay to play around with this idea but when i check solo.ckpool.org i saw that the reason it exists is because you cant mine to your own bitcoin core node.

Why is this? is mining to your own node some lost art and how do these pools do it? like how else would they get the mining work anywhere else but the node? could someone please explain this to me?

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[paid2]

I will quote an excellent answer from BlackHatCoiner :

Why it is not allowed any longer to solo mine directly using Bitcoin Core wallet?

Solo-mining is always allowed by Bitcoin Core. It'd be ironic if the official release of a Bitcoin client didn't have a solo-mining option.

Open your Bitcoin Core console and type “generatetoaddress <nblocks> <address> <maxtries>”.

Example:

Code:

generatetoaddress 1 tb1qm87j39792m2afwduss7hfwqg3xxrrz2tz8yxrw 2000000000

You won't be able to solve a block, because the difficulty is incredibly high for an average solo-miner. Try creating your own hard fork of Bitcoin and then use that for solo-mining, just to see that you're allowed to do that.

Here you will find a topic related to your question :

Solo mining using Bitcoin Core wallet

Here the list of topics related on solo mining I made some months ago, you will find some links to self-hosted solo pools, and solo mining in general if you are interested in this subject :

[MEGA TOPIC] SOLO MINING

I think all these resources will give you an opportunity to do more researches and to understand the pro and coins of each solution possible

[BitMaxz]

I don't think the above response will work but I think running BFGminer with a stratum proxy can mine you solo check this link below to get some idea
- https://github.com/raspiblitz/raspiblitz/issues/414#issuecomment-471227225

Or run your own mining pool like yiimp you can download the open-source from the link below


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

[DaveF]

The main issue of solo mining really just comes down to the fact that the odds of someone just running an old miner or two miners of finding a block is just about zero. Not saying that you can't get lucky, it's just that at doing it this way you are more or less just playing the lottery. Joining a pool at least you have somewhat regular payouts. Solo mine, and you may never see anything.

The other issue also becomes mining to your own node means you have to make sure that you've got enough performance on the machine running it that it could keep up with everything and an Internet bandwidth that if you do find a block it doesn't get orphaned because some other pool found it but your block didn't propagate.

People who have been running pools for years could tell you all the pitfalls of doing it. Drive issues, communications issues, and hosts of other things. For the one or two percent (or less) that solo pools will charge if you do find a block you are probably better off just giving up those small amounts if you do happen to find a block then loosing the entire thing because you made a configuration mistake.

-Dave

[Coose365]

I dont really care about profits with this s9 it got it for barely 100 bucks. i have good asics that i expect profit from. this s9 is a sorta toy to mess around with because i am interested in how bitcoin works on a technical level, from what i understand it that miners connect to nodes so that the nodes can tell miners what to mine without nodes the miners would be bricks.

But from what i am hearing is that bitcoin core nodes don't natively support just strait up miners connecting to them and mining right away. In this regard i am confused because how else would this be done?

[kano]

I dont really care about profits with this s9 it got it for barely 100 bucks. i have good asics that i expect profit from. this s9 is a sorta toy to mess around with because i am interested in how bitcoin works on a technical level, from what i understand it that miners connect to nodes so that the nodes can tell miners what to mine without nodes the miners would be bricks.

But from what i am hearing is that bitcoin core nodes don't natively support just strait up miners connecting to them and mining right away. In this regard i am confused because how else would this be done?

Well, if you don't ever find a block, you aren't really doing anything useful solo mining - so profits are relevant

Your node being a node, with or without mining, is the same use to the network, unless you do find a block.
i.e. you aren't securing the network unless you do find a block.

Keeping the network alive by running a node is all you are doing with a low solo hash rate,
so your usefulness to the network is the same without solo mining.
... and if you do find just that one and only block solo mining to your own node, well, cool ...

[mocacinno]

Just a suggestion: you mention you're learning, why not mine on the testnet instead? The diff is still pretty high for a TEST network, but with an S9 you should be able to mine a couple of blocks once in a while (with allmost 0 block reward nowadays), but atleast you'll be able to see everything in action

If the testnet cannot entice you, there are a couple altcoins that are clones from bitcoin and use sha256d as POW algo with a much lower diff than bitcoin's main net... The income will be peanuts aswell tough.

https://coinmarketcap.com/view/sha-256/

I used to mine peercoin with a usb block eruptor back in the days, when the bitcoin networks diff was waaaay to high to use an usb miner, but on peercoin it was still low enough... Don't know if this is still valid tough!

[ranochigo]

Using BFG as a stratum proxy will work. You cannot use GBT with Bitcoin Core because most of the mining clients are affected by the change in the coinbase data in Bitcoin Core when using Bitcoin Core with GBT. Run BFGMiner with stratum port flag, and specify a port for your ASICs to connect to. If they're on the same network, then you should be able to connect the S9 to your BFGminer with a proxy. There's plenty of tutorials online for this.

Otherwise, running it on Testnet is a better idea.

[Coose365]

so in order for my asic to mine to my node i have to run a stratum? ive seen stratum urls many times before but never knew what the reason was or why they were important but it seems that without one you cant connect to a node? am i correct?

[Skot]

I dont really care about profits with this s9 it got it for barely 100 bucks. i have good asics that i expect profit from. this s9 is a sorta toy to mess around with because i am interested in how bitcoin works on a technical level, from what i understand it that miners connect to nodes so that the nodes can tell miners what to mine without nodes the miners would be bricks.

But from what i am hearing is that bitcoin core nodes don't natively support just strait up miners connecting to them and mining right away. In this regard i am confused because how else would this be done?

Ignore the nay-sayers. This is a fun and valuable exercise that every bitcoin mining enthusiast should try at some point. Bitcoin core does not have the stratum server that miners require. You need some additional software -- just build and run ckpool on your node. It was recently updated for this exact purpose. https://bitbucket.org/ckolivas/ckpool-solo/src/solobtc/

good luck!

[ranochigo]

so in order for my asic to mine to my node i have to run a stratum? ive seen stratum urls many times before but never knew what the reason was or why they were important but it seems that without one you cant connect to a node? am i correct?

GetBlockTemplate is broken with the outdated miners and most of them are not well maintained, the last time I checked. Stratum is a low latency and bandwidth protocol that is used to connect your ASICs to a server which is why it gets recommended more than any other protocol. Antminer doesn't support GBT as well, only Stratum. Your best chance is to run a stratum proxy, which can be done with BFGMiner.

[darkv0rt3x]

I'm solo mining with an ESP32 and NerdMiner from github. It is just for the fun, of course. My ESP32 doesn't even go as high as some other ESP32 with an LCD from NerdMinerV2. I compiled some other older repo that was used to build NerdMinerv2 if I'm not mistaken!

[honglu69]

Just a suggestion: you mention you're learning, why not mine on the testnet instead? The diff is still pretty high for a TEST network, but with an S9 you should be able to mine a couple of blocks once in a while (with allmost 0 block reward nowadays), but atleast you'll be able to see everything in action

If the testnet cannot entice you, there are a couple altcoins that are clones from bitcoin and use sha256d as POW algo with a much lower diff than bitcoin's main net... The income will be peanuts aswell tough.

https://coinmarketcap.com/view/sha-256/

I used to mine peercoin with a usb block eruptor back in the days, when the bitcoin networks diff was waaaay to high to use an usb miner, but on peercoin it was still low enough... Don't know if this is still valid tough!

For just learning purposes, yes,  testnet makes more sense then zero profit on bitcoin mainnet.

If OP is really interested in learning, there are alternative sha256 coins,  for example,  Cheetahcoin is solo mining friendly coin that  S9 or even gekko or TTBIT usb device can easily mine, and even encouraged by the algorithm on solo mining set up.  

[mikeywith]

The reason for this is that mining directly to your own Bitcoin Core node is no longer supported due to certain technical limitations.

There are right about a dozen wrong statements in your comment, mining to your own node is still possible, using the word supported is rather wrong because that brings up a question; "supported by who"?

Mining to ones node will always be possible given how BTC works, it's just a question of feasibility and nothing more.

Since mining is highly competitive, the probability of an individual miner finding a block is quite low.

Every block found on the network is found by a single small miner, many people mined individually and managed to find blocks, some did that with USB sticks that don't mine faster than a few gigahashes per second, besides, we don't know OP' hashrate, he could be mining with 10EH worth of hashrate, so his chances of finding blocks mining to his node are a lot larger than the changes of couple mining pools combined.

The only drawback of mining to your own node would be the reliability aspect, mining isn't just about getting lucky and hitting a block, you need to stay constantly synced with other nodes, and you need to have a very fast connection to other nodes (especially the mining ones), block downloading, processing, and prorogation are very sensitive and there is zero room for error, it's plain stupid to risk losing blocks by mining to a node that runs on an old laptop sitting in the garage hooked up to your not so reliable 10mbps ADSL.

[ABCbits]

However, nowadays, most people use mining pools even for solo mining. The reason for this is that mining directly to your own Bitcoin Core node is no longer supported due to certain technical limitations.

Inaccurate, it was removed since built-in CPU mining on Bitcoin Core useless with existence of ASIC[1].

Mining to your own node is not practical anymore because it requires you to have substantial mining power to compete with the collective power of mining pools.

There's also concern with internet connection which leads to slower block propagation.

Mining pools handle the distribution of mining work to individual miners within the pool.
They provide the necessary instructions for miners to solve complex mathematical problems and validate transactions.
While the mining pool handles the work distribution, each miner still connects to their own Bitcoin node for blockchain synchronization and validation of the mined blocks.

Wrong, miner who connect to pool doesn't need to run their own node since pool use Stratum protocol.

By connecting to a pool, you can still maintain the benefits of decentralization while actively participating in the mining process.

Also wrong, it brings centralization concern where pool could perform passive attack such as intentionally exclude certain transaction.

[1] https://bitcoin.org/en/release/v0.13.0#removal-of-internal-miner

[lovesmayfamilis]

The reason for this is that mining directly to your own Bitcoin Core node is no longer supported due to certain technical limitations.

There are right about a dozen wrong statements in your comment,

This is another proof that texts written with an AI tool should not be trusted. In the same way, those who use AI are like the same soulless robots who have empty heads.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5456516.msg62617386#msg62617386

[FP91G]

Micro $3 Bitcoin miners won’t make bank, but that’s not the point: Inventors
Pocket-sized Bitcoin miners are a stand against the “secrecy and exclusivity” of the Bitcoin mining industry, according to their inventors.
While lacking in performance, micro Bitcoin mining devices should be seen as a stand against the Bitcoin ecosystem’s purportedly biggest flaw, its inventors argue.

Micro Bitcoin mining devices — often open-source and pocket-sized — have been serving a niche part of the market, offering buyers a fully assembled device or a do-it-yourself-kit to mine Bitcoin (BTC) solo.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, developers behind these kits admit that buyers won’t likely see much profit but argue that it’s important to fight the “secrecy and exclusivity” of the Bitcoin mining industry.

One company, BitMaker, recently claimed that one could be made for as little as $3, offering an output of 50 kilohashes per second.
https://coinmarketcap.com/community/articles/64f69751ee3a4a5a9190e64a/

[decryptit]

Any guide on on how to set up your own stratum address? I have a bitcoin core running on testnet.