Solo mining
-
I am an enthusiastic proponent of solo-mining. I find it largely immune to DDOSing (unlike pools), and very easy to set up. I do recommend that you add a p2pool with stratum as a cheeky backup pool to ensure that you are notified of new blocks promptly (which you can do in cgminer by specifying a second -o -u- and -p).
Some people will be put off by the variance, but as long as you plan to be mining for a few multiples of the expected time for a block with your hashrate (so practically everyone), this variance will quickly even out, and you won’t be penalised for starting and stopping, as you would be with PPLNS, or have withdrawal thresholds and fees. It’s important to think about it in terms of probability, in that the longer you do it for, the more it will tend to the expected value. And difficulty is only going to decrease in the near future, which will make variance even less of an issue.
-
[quote name=“F8ECBB6F02F7C” post=“8350” timestamp=“1370006369”]
I am an enthusiastic proponent of solo-mining. I find it largely immune to DDOSing (unlike pools), and very easy to set up. I do recommend that you add a p2pool with stratum as a cheeky backup pool to ensure that you are notified of new blocks promptly (which you can do in cgminer by specifying a second -o -u- and -p).Some people will be put off by the variance, but as long as you plan to be mining for a few multiples of the expected time for a block with your hashrate (so practically everyone), this variance will quickly even out, and you won’t be penalised for starting and stopping, as you would be with PPLNS, or have withdrawal thresholds and fees. It’s important to think about it in terms of probability, in that the longer you do it for, the more it will tend to the expected value. And difficulty is only going to decrease in the near future, which will make variance even less of an issue.
[/quote]Hey,
Could you help me understand this a bit better please? If I start solo mining for say 30 mins and then stop for a day and start again do I lose any of my efforts from the first 30mins?
If the right strategy is adopted do you get more bang for buck on an optimal solo mine strategy than a pool?
Thanks.
-
[quote name=“F8ECBB6F02F7C” post=“8350” timestamp=“1370006369”]
I do recommend that you add a p2pool with stratum as a cheeky backup pool to ensure that you are notified of new blocks promptly (which you can do in cgminer by specifying a second -o -u- and -p).
[/quote]That is good advice.
I still can’t assign a payment address my choice when solo mining?
-
When you are solo-mining, the only time that your efforts are rewarded is when you actually find a block. Every time you calculate a hash when you solo-mine, there is a miniscule probability that you will find a block. However, over the course of hundreds of billions of hashes (a few days at 2MH/s), the probability that you won’t have found a block grows smaller and smaller. Over time, this will even out quite nicely, and your time per block will be:
Block time = Difficulty * 2^32 / Hashrate
So you are no more or less likely to find a block in the next minute if you have just found one five minutes ago, or if you haven’t found one for a week, but the probability of you being lucky or unlucky (overall) will grow smaller and smaller over time. So just think of it in terms of the longer you do if for, the more chances you are giving yourself of getting the block reward.
I chose to solo-mine because my expected time to a block is relatively short (3.3 days), so that I can see exactly what’s going on, to avoid pool fees, withdrawal thresholds and limits, and because pools can be less efficient for various reasons (downtime, DDOS, block witholding attacks, fraudulent operators and users (vis. the recent stratum vulnerability) in some cases). You would want to use a pool if the expected time for a block was very large (eg. Bitcoin c. 300 days), and you couldn’t handle the variance, or if block times were extremely short (eg. 5 seconds) during a mining rush, and a pool’s better internet position might mean that their blocks were less likely to be orphaned.
And Pyxis - I’m not aware of a way of getting the block reward of going somewhere other than feathercoin-qt; perhaps an additional program could automatically forward the funds to an address of your choice.
-
[quote name=“F8ECBB6F02F7C” post=“8359” timestamp=“1370009921”]
And Pyxis - I’m not aware of a way of getting the block reward of going somewhere other than feathercoin-qt; perhaps an additional program could automatically forward the funds to an address of your choice.
[/quote]Cool, I was thinking as much, as I couldn’t find anything online.
I agree with you that solo mining has great advantages, my ETB is only 48 hours, and my luck has been good, the only downside to solo mining is waiting 120 confirms if your used to using a low confirm pool.