I am "solo" mining in ckpool because it keeps me from having to run a full node at work (which I can't do, but I do at home), and I like that this pool is lightweight and connected to high speed low latency bitcoin nodes for rapid block change notification and propagation. What I am hoping to achieve is to contribute, albeit negligibly, to the Bitcoin network while giving myself a lottery ticket that plays every 10 minutes.
I suppose it makes sense if you're after the "thrill" of gambling, but do note this doesn't contribute to the network any more than using a pool sharing rewards between miners.
The entire network benefit of solo mining, comes from the locally administrated full node.
I don't seem to be finding any shares, however, which seems odd to me. Command line display shows it chugging along at ~2.1gh, but not finding shares. Not sure if that is a BFGminer issue or not. Been running 10 minutes now and no shares
. Could this be a difficulty setting issue?
Note that real solo mining does not use shares.
ckpool's server appears to use diff ~1k shares, which should take about 35 minutes
on average per share with 2.1 Gh/s.
I don't see that BFGminer supports --suggest-diff or anything of that sort. [edit, found option --request-diff, which I think is the same thing, tried using it with value 6 and it would not connect to pool, so maybe not what I was looking for]
ckpool does not support request-diff, and instead implemented (over a year later IIRC) an incompatible way to do the same thing in an apparent effort to push people away from BFGMiner.
If you don't like their diff 1024 target, perhaps the best option is to run a private poolserver on your full node?
Eloipool can help with that if it's a Linux system.