Keep in mind that a mining farm is also a solo miner but with a higher hashrate. Also, it is not just the address that indicates this is a solo miner it is the fact that the miner is not sharing the work with other miners and the work they perform is unique (on a block that is different from every one else).
it all depends on if the block data collation and the setting of which asic gets which work is managed by the asic owner locally or by a pool manager remotely
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it is not about if the winner gets 98% or 0.00x% of a reward. its about who manages what work an asic is given.
if the work is chosen collated and distributed by a manager remotely. then that manager is a pool.
if an asic has its own bitcoin node and that node collates its block purely for its asic. LOCALLY then that is solo
This is a personal opinion held strongly by franky1. It is not an incorrect way to think about the differences between solo and pool mining, but it is also not the only way of describing solo mining. It is not even the most commonly accepted description of solo mining. While there are others that would agree with franky1 that you are not "solo mining" if you are not personally running and managing the software that creates the block headers, it is far more common to describe solo mining in reference to the mining rewards. For the majority of people, you are solo mining if you ONLY earn a reward when one of YOUR hashers find the solution to a block, and your are pool mining if you share in the rewards when hashers run by OTHERS in the pool find a solution to a block.
If a pool exists where the rewards are shared among participants based on the amount of hash power that they each contribute to the pool, BUT each participant gets to run their own software to choose for themselves which transactions are included in the block (and builds those blocks themselves), would you call that solo mining? Since the rewards are being shared, most wouldn't. I've asked this question of franky1 in the past and haven't gotten an answer from him yet, so I'm not sure what his thoughts are on that or where it fits into his opinion of how to define "solo mining".
imagine it like employment.
pool mining is a boss that sends work orders to employees. and they do the work passed to them and get paid based on the work done
the difference with CK is that he has interns that are unpaid for their daily work and he just pays 98% of business income to the employee of the month that met a target.
totally different than independant self-employed workers who themselves create their own work and get paid from the work they do
pool mining is a boss that sends work orders to employees. and they do the work passed to them and get paid based on the work done
the difference with CK is that he has interns that are unpaid for their daily work and he just pays 98% of business income to the employee of the month that met a target.
totally different than independant self-employed workers who themselves create their own work and get paid from the work they do
While I like this analogy, I think an alternative analogy that more closely matches would be to consider "pool" miners as those that are actual "employees". They get paid their salary (or hourly wage) regardless of how much money they personally bring in for the business, and regardless of which employee in the company completes the job that all the employees are working on. An employee that works more hours will get paid more since he did more work, but everyone that works gets paid. Solo mining with this analogy would be more like an independent contractor. The contractee still assigns the jobs for the contractor to do, but the contractor only gets paid for the specific tasks that they successfully complete. The revenue that the contractor generates for the contractee is not shared among any other employees of the contractee nor any other contractors that the contractee may have contracts with. Some contractors may choose to go out and find jobs independently, others may rely on a service to find the jobs for them (and will then have to pay a small fee for that service), but in either case, they only get paid for the specific tasks that they successfully complete
