Topic: Does physical location matter? Particularly in solo ventures (Read 323 times)

I've been solo mining BTC for over 5 years and it is always good to have lower latency to your bitcoin node, however what is more important would be the number of connections your node has up and downstream.

Make sure you open up the listening ports to enable more nodes to connect to your mining node to have faster updates in terms of mempool tx and especially new blocks being found to ensure you don't mine a stale block.

In terms of "chances" of finding a block just because you have a local node, it wouldn't matter for nuts as it is all pure random chance as that is what sha256d mining is right now and there is NO benefit to having a node locally compared to one that issues getblocktemplate jobs from half way round the world.

It is similar to the myth that some shops gives you a better chance to win a lottery just because a few winners were from there in the past. Statistically, the myth is perpetuated because as more people buy from a particular shop it has a higher chance of finding a lottery winner. As more "foolhardy" people queue to buy from the shop the chances of lottery winners from that shop increases just because there are more people/combinations.

If you have multiple blocks in a day, yes invest heavily in low latency setup and have nodes running in the same subnet, but if you are thinking of doing it for fun/luck, best to invest in getting more miners @ the lowest price & electrical cost.

On paper, mining against your own node is "better", but in the real world, it's not, because running mining a node is not easy, and there is a huge difference between just a node and a mining node, a mining node needs to be perfectly connected to the other mining nodes, letting the other miners (in today's world 'pools') know that you found a block as fast as possible is key, so that they stop working on the current block and thus reduce the chances of orphan blocks.

In fact, I won't be surprised if large pools have some other means of communicating outside of bitcoin network to allow fast block proportion, also if your node goes down for whatever reason like a server issue, the consequences for a mining node are devastating, not saying it's impossible, but it's close to impossible to maintain a mining node on your local PC with your home grade router and an internet connection, you need to spend a good amount of money for a dedicated server that meets all basic requirements.

Solo pools do all of that for you for FREE, and charge you a tiny bit of fee in the event of finding a block, I say free because it's free, they charge you nothing if you don't find a block, which isn't the case when renting a server, you will have to pay those fees wether or not you find a block, so really, it's a no-brainer when it comes to mining, if you want to run a mining node for the sake of helping with BTC decentralization -- go for it, but don't risk losing a whole block while paying more fees just to mine BTC.


Ya, it's pretty much that, just think of it this way, if large pools with mining nodes spread all over the globe using super high-end servers and dedicated gigabit connections still lose orphan races once in a while, how bad is it going to be for me running a mining a node on my 3 years old laptops with 10mbps shared connection?



You can use trusted small pools like Kano.is, the total hashrate there is pretty small so if the pool happens to hit a block, you get some heavy payouts, other people like willi9974 use a different approach where he collects say 10 folks, each of them pays x amount of BTC and they rent some good hashrate and point it to cksolo pool hopping to hit a block.

So, if we wanted to allocate a % of hashrate to a solo situation, using something like CK pool would be just as effective as mining to a node we had onsite/physically closer to our miners, themselves?

That's the takeaway I've came to with this thread. The orphan block comment was mainly what I was trying to understand, I guess.

What about working with smaller pools? Is that a thing? Where you combine forces/hashrate to a solo-like endeavor with a group of other similar minded miners trying to survive. ?

Thanks!

Mining on self node in BTC network has a fundamental good point is that a BTC is going to your BTC address, which can avoid a risk of operation failure in pool side or dishonourable operator of pools. So solo miner must bear this in mind. Bad point is you has to run a node with more computer power and cost.  Risk/Reward issue!

Mining on PPLN in a pool. Now, it is USD 9 cent /  1TH/s per day, which only cover some cost and won't let you rich or hit a big excite.

So, it may be better to run both modes, set up two mining farms or three miners, etc.

Right right. I understand that all, mostly.

So, what if you are not using a "solo pool"; such as ck and literally mining to a full mining node.........you know what......nevermind. I think it's more trouble than it's worth to go down this route of FULL blown solo mining.

I think MAYBE it might be worth allocating a % of hashrate to a smaller pool or something and ultimately this is what I'm exploring: alternative ways of mining as opposed to 100% PPLNS pool mining.

Any good threads or links you know of about alternative mining strategies? Either way , thank you for your input on this.

Short answer : NO.

If you are using a solo pool to solo mine BTC, then your node sits there doing exactly nothing useful to that process itself, and what matters here would be your connection to the pool and the pool's overall relay capabilities to the other nodes.

But keep in mind all of this has NOTHING to do with your chances of finding blocks, your chances depend 100% on the hashrate you have, but once and when you find a block, then it becomes a question of how fast it gets broadcast, how close the mining node is to other mining nodes because if someone else solves the same blocks and somehow happens to propagate it faster than you, you lose an orphan race and your block gets rejected, but those cases are extremely low and as long as you use a proper pool which you have a good connection to -- all you have to worry about is your luck.

I have a nagging question about mining solo. I've read about small super lucky miners finding blocks with barely any hashrate and I remember one mentioning they had a node running, as well.

Given how I understand nodes and miners - which is super limited I admit, humbly - does it make more sense to solo mine while running a node at the same location??

I've heard of "latency" talk, too, and am just wondering if a miner really close to a node stands a better chance than a solo miner that's really far away from a node.

In short, does running a node at the same location as your miners, same internet network, etc...help ones chances of solving a block?

Thank you for your time