Topic: Another solo miner with approximately 86TH solved a solo block (Read 266 times)

the mindset is simple. (mind not mined)

if you usually waste $3 a day on coffee that just ends up as urine flushed down a toilet 6 hours later.. you might aswell stop buying coffee and use the $3 a day trying to earn more.

deciding which pool to join. either a share reward for small regular amounts. or deciding solo reward for once in a lifetime chance of large reward, is then upto you.

i think ck is trying to advertise/publicise his pool more now with the gimmicky words of "solo" and falsifying that his worker had 86thash when it only solved it with a 3thash(usb hub of 9 miners). is more so trying to get more bigger miners to join his pool, hoping he can get more regular blocks to get more regular 2%.

after all it is not a good advert for ck to admit only a 3thash 'rig' solved a block as it then makes  other small miners jump in. causing more bandwidth and server strain for little to no hashrate gain for the pool

EG imagine if a asic farm of 200x 110thash asics joined the pool. that would literally double ck pools workload. and double the chances of ck pool getting a block for ck to get his 2% more often.

as for those wondering about the 'high' 2%.. its not that high in comparison to other pools
ck pool     - 30peta  - 2% fee
slush pool - 10000peta  - 2% fee
antpool     - 28000peta  - 4% fee  
f2pool       - 30000peta  - 4% fee

I fancy fitting some solar panels on the van, and trying solo mining using public wifi. I suspect that the possible success rate will be close to  zero, but it would be a fun project for a while.

I personally would call this more like a lottery than mining, you get to mine a block in ages being a solo miner and post that and before that, all you are doing is burning your equipment as well as burning electricity at the same time. If we go by the calculation he mined 6.25 BTC which could be around 200k$ which really is a whopping amount and definitely would be lesser than the cost he has incurred so far on mining. Probably he should just quit mining now and go for some other profession, because he ain't getting another block to mine for rest of his life or he can join any mining pool.

its a standard USB hub (usb multiport) and then the usb stick miners plugged into them are gekkoscience brand. each performing at 300gh/s. the usb stick actualy has 1 bitmain asic chip on it
but yea a usb stick doing 300ghash. .. in 2014 i had a 300ghash asic that was bigger than a shoe box.. great how fast some bitcoin innovations progress over time


reading more into the personal story of the reward winner
its said the owner had about 9 usb sticks per 'rig' (3thash) and he personally had the capacity of running 86thash (~280 usb devices) but he was only running 3 rigs (27 devices) at the time of his reward

Good stuff. Idk there is something device that work like that, I thought all mining devices particularly for bitcoin mining only work on asic devices?

Maybe you can mention what's the name of this USB hub particularly it's brand. It's worth to know about it.

the winner had a USB hub with like a dozen USB miner dongles on it.
not what i would call a farm. more so just a hobby miner.
this is his so called "farm"



the electric usage would have been way under 500w so would cost him about $1 in electric a day for the chance of a over $200k reward. he was very lucky to get that reward. but it was not due to him having a massive farm..

with all blocks of all pools there is always one asic that solves the block. always.. his chance of solving another one is probably more then 400 years away. so it was pure luck he had the solution. and also luck that he chose to use a pool with suck a large reward which was specified to the solution giver instead of sharing it out amongst everyone

It's not that easy to think imo, that means this solo miner has lots of resources or maybe with huge probability with free electricity he got in his sleeve to operate which not all miners have, imagine this his first time getting the reward, so what's his means to pay in electricity before? If not he have some asic joined in some pool but I don't think can cover his electricity cost, but to think he can solo mine, either he has free electricity as said or super cheap cost electricity.

This is something I've known all along, and never disagreed about with you.  My disagreement is that the fact that ck is creating the block templates isn't sufficient to disqualify it from being called "solo mining".  I know you want to create a new term called pool rewarding that you want understood to be different than pool mining, but that just isn't the way the majority of users have been using those words in the past. Pool mining, since it's beginning, has always been about miners sharing the rewards between them.


Sure, 2% was worth less, but the block reward was worth less as well, so it was still 2% of all revenue for that miner.  Regardless of how little that is, it still seems high to me.  I suspect that the biggest reason that it is still that high is due to a lack of competition. If someone else creates a popular pool identical to ckpool and offered a lower fee, then possibly the competition would drive down BOTH fees.  However, that's only true if ckpool is actually keeping a profit.

They claim that there is no profit.  If that's true, then the 2% is just covering their costs (or they are operating at a loss), in which case competition will not drive the fee any lower since there is no incentive to continue operating at any lower of a fee.

the pool (looking at stats in previous posts) is not a farm, its lots of small users in different locations.
the users (looking at stats in previous posts)its hobby miners not farms, its ~2200 people with 5-6 asics each on average.

a block if we average it as 600 seconds.
imagine your a normal home user with 8 connections to peers and say there are 80,000 nodes to reach where each peer also has 8 connections

8*8*8*8*8=32k(4 relays)  so your going to need 5 relays to reach 80k nodes meaning if each relay takes just 1 second that is atleast 5 seconds
(EG home internet at 8mbps = >1 sec to send 8 blocks)

then its the case that because you are not in the centre circle of the important nodes you are going to get previous block a few relays after the important nodes. which is another few seconds.

so just at relay delay of getting pre block and sending out your solved block is more then 1% delay(>6seconds)


however pools that are at the centre of the circle with 900mbps speed can reach the important nodes(otherpools and merchant tools) in 1 relay under 1 second. and the rest of the network in a couple fast relays
so what might take you 7-10 seconds just in bandwidth time can be just 1-2 seconds for pools

then its the smaller millisecond math of how fast a blocktemplate can be formed and then sending the work to an asic and updated the asic with new work each time it runs out of extra nonces. generally a pool can do this and send it to your asic faster than a home hobby miner can do self managed locally.

so the 'speed benefit' of pooling might be 1.x% but also a pool has lots of servers and thousands of bandwidth connections to cost in.
so 2% might not actually be unreasonable.

---

but then again. a block reward is 6.25*$35k=$218k so 2% is $4375
however although the POOL showed it solved 10 blocks in 23 months.
an average user if it did indeed go solo would take 400 years to mine a block. and the monthly internet bill of a 900mbps connection to have the same low latency delay as a pool will cost you more then $4k by the time you get a lucky block

Gambling with 50/50 odds a hundred times (practically) assures me profit, on some of the tosses. On average in the whole run though...

Profit IS assured with daily trading.  What isn't assured is who is going to profit.

Thanks, that's exactly what I was asking about.  That said, I didn't do the math, but 1% (or 2%) of in case I find a block within seconds of another blocks...

How many seconds of latency must a miner save for the odds of a block collision to decrease by 1%?

And don't I have to just trust the claim about being "well connected" or is there a way for a miner to verify that?

I am in no way saying that it doesn't have legitimate use case.  "I'd rather pay a cut than having to bother with all that" is absolutely legit.  As for the connectivity advantage, I still feel that the line is so fine that we may only guess whether it it is worth that 1% or 2%.

Though, considering the current value of the block reward, it's still difficult for me to think that the owner of a farm large enough to mine solo would not want to "bother" doing it itself.

Let's just think it's just a kind of lottery in the mining industry where only a few people have won it. As simple as that would rest your mind and not get a strange idea that you could also get those lucky blocks. Nevertheless, if you won't have any problem with your electricity bill, you can try to mine too if you have enough components but if you don't have anything, then it's better to stay on daily trading where the profit is assured.

its not just about solving a block. its then propagating that solve out to the whole network so other peers can "first seen" it and declare it a winner if its validated before another pool gets a solve.

a pool is not connected to just 8 nodes like a normal home hobby user is. a pool is usually connected to hundreds of nodes including other pools.
other pools dont waste their connections on that many random users. they prefer to white list other pools and then merchant services(economically important nodes) who then propagate out to their peers.

so the more connections a pool has to important peers means their block solve gets seen and validated before other pools solve their block. and of course a pool is connected to the 13000 asics(2325 users)

..
a normal hobby miner doing true and very well known actual solo mining where it has to get the previous block, create its own header and then send the work to its own asic, takes longer. for these reasons:

its not in the same hierarchy of the important nodes peer connections (pools and merchants) so it gets its last block delayed by atleast two peer 'relay times',
..then because its usually managed by a desktop computer which validates the previous block slower. and then prunes off the spent coins out of mempool and then picks the unspent transactions from mempool to add to a template. means the hobby miner managing itself would take longer to form a template. and then because its not then well connected to other peers. if it solved a block, propagating that block might require several 'relay times' before the important nodes see it.

all of which gives pools an upper hand of multiple seconds compared to a home hobby miner doing it truly solo.

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with that said yes 2% seems high. but then again 2% was not worth much years ago and CK simply has not decreased his amount.
and the asics that use CK have no choice. accept what CK programs to give them or use another pool. because after all asics/users dont set the rate, the pool does

I may be missing something, but how does connecting to ckpool "lower" any latency?  The block header is 80 bytes, and AFAIK most miners are okay with mining an empty block on top of a valid header for a few seconds because "Who the heck would produce a valid header without a valid merkle-root?" Sure, the previous block needs to be downloaded completely to figure which transactions to include in the next block, but we are talking about 2% fee.

So high speed (which I assume means "high throughput" in this context) seems practically (if not completely) unnecessary. Then latency being the main (arguably only) important factor, I remain unconvinced.

as danny is now seeming to realise(congratulations) that its CK that create the block templates and ck that make the payment arrangement to give 98% to someone.

the reason for the 2% is easy to explain.
2% was worth alot less years ago. and ck simply has not reduced it to 1% or less, in recent years.
the user that got a 98% reward. has 4 asics averaging 3thash/s each, all using the same reward address
{
 "hashrate1m": "10.2T",

   "workername": "3EoqjNmeaaVvVDCPbVXxQQRH6UFpDUqpPg.Golf1",
   "hashrate1m": "2.97T",

   "workername": "3EoqjNmeaaVvVDCPbVXxQQRH6UFpDUqpPg.MegaRig02",
   "hashrate1m": "0",

   "workername": "3EoqjNmeaaVvVDCPbVXxQQRH6UFpDUqpPg.TheOmen",
   "hashrate1m": "4.15T",

   "workername": "3EoqjNmeaaVvVDCPbVXxQQRH6UFpDUqpPg.MegaRig01",
   "hashrate1m": "3.41T",
}


ck pool manages
{"Users": 2325, "Workers": 13532,}{"hashrate1m": "26P",
thats ~ 13532 asics running at ~2thash/sec each

with 26peta at play all working to solve a block. every 2.3 months on average the pool solved a block. and within that pool the asic that was the lucky one gets the win

emphasis on average
out of 190exahash network, the 26peta pool is a 1 in 7300 chance of solving a block
every fortnight there are 2016 blocks so on average a block 'should' be solved by ck pool once every 1month 3 weeks
but looking at the last 10 blocks solved by ck pool, it has averaged at a rate of 1 every 2.3 months.
so it has had a period of bad luck and now having a period of goodluck.
thats the thing about randomness. its never an even projected/predicted result. you can have good and bad months

This is the second or third time somebody got so lucky with ridiculously unlikely odds recently. Some people have all the luck but it’s just a lucky streak, a freak occurrence. Please don’t start thinking this is possible for you because it’s very unlikely.

I suspect that this is probably the biggest reason:


Solving a block is only half the battle.  First, the software that is building the block headers needs to hear about solved blocks as quickly as possible so you don't waste time mining a stale block at a height that is already propagated to a significant portion of the network. Then, once you do solve a block, you need to get it propagated to the majority of the network's hashpower before anyone else does the same.

2% a a fee feels a bit high to me.  While there is some risk of losing a block due to poor propagation, I'd think that for most that risk would be less than 1%?

CKPool claims:

But, I am left wondering where that 2% is going if it isn't being kept as profit. Perhaps running a pool like that is more expensive than I realize.

A very large miner who want to stay low profile (i.e. not advertise to the world that he has massive mining power) may prefer to appear as a lot of smaller miners. The same way one may prefer to hold large funds across multiple addresses with lower values rather than some large amounts on one or very few addresses. The blockchain is public.

I have a harder time understanding why any "solo miner" would pay 2% to some "service provider" rather than mine on its own.

https://solo.ckpool.org/ lists several use cases.
The lottery one is the only one that really makes sense to me,
A last resort backup also make sense to me,
But in my opinion, neither do not satisfactorily explain the several blocks found recently.

your mindset is solo rewarding rather than share rewarding. ..
solo MINING is about management of the MINING WORK

also the pool is the business that has employees(workers) its not that a pool is the worker..
so dont try mixing metaphors.

a business with employees where the manager sets the work for the employees is a pool

a self employed worker with no boss telling him what to do and no one to be accountable to is solo

i know you now want to add in a new paradigm of a contractee contractor. but CK is not a contractee.. as his stratum is the same management system as a pool. all that changes is the reward share. being CK 2% worker 98% instead of CK 100% 0% worker, then negotiate share separately.

the WORK management for ck pool and other pools is the same. all thats different is the pay structure

solo vs pool MINING is about who manages the MINING the secret is in the word mining
solo rewarding vs share rewarding is about the payout rate. not the mining task

different pools have different pay schemes. changing just the pay scheme does not mean a miner is suddenly a solo miner.

a business that pays waitresses just on tip they personally worked. does not mean she is no longer an employee of the cafe. because if she was not an employee. she would not be working in the cafe being told which tables to service.
it just means she has a different pay structure and is probably going to not take home any money if she doesnt do the work

if she was self employed, she would own the cafe and serve the tables herself. and keep all the money.

It's not good strategy to do solo mining nowadays and if a miner has to pay electricity bill. Chance to find a block by solo mining is very low, almost impossible. So it most cases and many blocks, a solo miner will end with failure but still has to pay bill for electricity that is painful.

It's only applicable if electricity is free and if ASIC is free too. It is useless and risky to buy an ASIC and do solo mining, even with free electricity. How long will it take to get initial capital for an ASIC back with solo mining? Months or years?