Topic: [Guide / review] solo-mining, Nicehash/MiningRigRentals, how to choose solo pool (Read 403 times)

Indeed and if you use MRR you will pay a lot more for each submitted share, so dramatically reduce your chances of getting a block.
Some people insist on using MRR, probably coz they get some kick back.

Thank you sir! Really appreciate the community support here.

Cheers & may BTC profits build your dream home!

Nope.

1 submitted share = 1 attempt to find a block

For the same amount of BTC, if you rent cheaper, you will have more shares, so more chances to have your block.

Of course AsicBoost is the way to go, giving you more or less +10%

Just wanted to thank the OP. This write-up was very helpful.

Thinking about renting some hashrate and wondering if there's any higher a likelihood of getting a block if I rent the more expensive SHA256 rigs, or should I rent SHA256AsicBoost rigs [cheaper overall]?

BTW I know the latest gen ASICs use AsicBoost (and my S19s do as well), but specifically when renting rigs for SOLO mining I'm wondering if there's any reason I'm missing to choose the pricier SHA256 rentals.

I did respond to your comment and explained why I don't recommend solo miners to mine on your pool. And I also underlined that everyone is free to form their own opinion and decide where they want to mine.

I said that to date no solo miner has mined a block on your pool

Feel free to air your personal differences with other pool operators in your threads, but not here, which will be deleted.
There is enough info out there for those interested to pick from.

100% this. It has always been the issue, not just with solo pools but any pool that is run by just 1 person.

CAN something horrible happen to all the operators working @ ViaBTC / prohashing / wherever. Yes, of course. But, it's a lot less likely then it happening to a pool with just one person running it.

On the flip side of that, if something does go wrong @ kano.is we all know who to blame, so there is that, there would be nothing we could do about it but we would know who to blame. The other side is also, if something does go wrong with other larger pools they MIGHT be able to send the BTC out of their own pockets. Antpool may suck for several reasons, but if they do loose your funds they can replace them out of pocket. Will they is a different story.

-Dave

Thanks for sharing your point of view. That's why I said I personally don't like potential profit going to a "third" party first. I wouldn't want to watch my >6.25 BTC profit get transferred to you, and shortly after read the message here on the board or somewhere else on a newspaper that you had an accident and died or something else bad happened to you and thus I never get my coins because they are parked on your bitcoin address.

There is no need for a "middleman", there is no need for a "bank" in between, if it can be done in another way --> directly. And that is exactly what the Coinbase transaction allows. That's why I can't recommend anyone to mine at a pool that doesn't allow them to use their own Bitcoin address for a direct (via coinbase transaction) potential reward payout. Ultimately, each miner has the choice to decide what they prefer.

Well you are comparing apples with apples.
The servers are the same for all mining, all the same work generation software, all the same that's found thousands of blocks that I've paid.
Heck I even paid out all the outstanding dust balances above 10000 sat last year.

The only differences now, is who KDB assigns who should get the reward.
This original reward management is in the public git for pplns, but I've simply added and tested an account type flag, pplns or solo, that decides who's balance is affected when a block is found.
Running the payout is the same as before also, but only one person will show up being owed.
Since I am the developer of all the software involved in this, even if it did screw up (which it wont), it's no issue to resolve either, it does not automatically send BTC anywhere, there is one manual step to simply tell it to generate the transaction, verify it and report what it is doing.
No doubt you'll add that having a manual step is a risk, but since most normal pools out there have had the opposite happen, where BTC was lost due to issues with their fully automatic payouts, and I never have lost any, I prefer that one manual step.

Correct. That's exactly what I wrote in the first thread:


Your pool has not yet found a block in "solo" mode and therefore the important note, one should not compare apples with oranges and to correctly interpret the place in the ranking.

Though I will add it is amusing I got the biggest write up full of your personal opinion of me

P.S. yes KanoPool has found 2433 blocks since 2014.
The only difference between solo and pplns is accounting, i.e. who I send the reward to.
I added that accounting recently, but yeah you weren't around while I paid out 2433 blocks, hundreds of millions of dollars, over the years.

Edit: but my point is that you also said:

So yeah you are ignoring the 2433 blocks paid by the pool and making a ridiculous statement.

The screenshots give an impression of which statistical data and functions are available and to what extent a pool is in demand and many users exist or not.
If you really care about sensitive data of your users (as you obviously deceptively propagate), I can highly recommend you to perform a pseudonimization of the data from the users who use your pool. Put them a mask on, not off. The screenshots shown here can be reproduced and extracted from the pages by anyone, so there is nothing to remove.

I'm not at all sure why you need to publicly post a list of all the current miner usernames on the pool and how that is on topic.
Certainly it would help bots and attackers - so I'd assume that's not your reason.
Please remove it.

*reserved*

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EDIT: important info:
I checked the solo mining pools presented in the second post for the Coinbase transaction they generate. For those who don't know what the coinbase transaction is --> this is the very first transaction within a block where the reward (of currently 6.25 BTC) plus the transaction fees are paid out to the lucky miner. The coinbase transaction can therefore be used to see the payout address(es) that the pool operator configured, so you can see where a payout would be made in the case of a successful mined block. Unfortunately some pools have turned out to be black sheeps, they are obviously SCAM. Please read carefully the warnings about the corresponding pools and avoid them! You wouldn't get a single Satoshi even in the case of a block hit, and you'd just be mad as hell.

Note: The payout amounts shown were snapshots when I read the coinbase transaction, which is why the total payout amount in the list differs from pool to pool. Since the number of transactions included in a block and differ from pool to pool, this results in different total payout amounts.

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Comparison of solo mining pools with my subjective rating:

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soloblocks.io (0.4%)

Pro:
Website clean and simple, with API function and freely selectable worker names. The pool operator has his own support thread here in the forum and also on Twitter. According to his own statement, he is not using a cheap VPS, but a dedicated baremetal server with dual-node failover, fast internet connection, NVMe disks and 32GB RAM. Since he is trying to get into the pool business as a newbie, some users have built up concerns about his pool and distrust. However, he goes out of his way to authentically address any questions and has taken the trouble to write a guide for a method that explains how to gain insight into his pool to gain trust. In doing so, he explains[/url] how to test your mining pool and verify that it really does what it is advertised to do. Anyone can verify through this method which payout address is used for withholding the pool fee and also the exact amount of the pool fee that is configured. All other known pool operators could take a leaf out of his book, he is the first to make this public in this form and offer it as a finished manual, I know of no other pool operator. He also makes no secret of the fact that he currently has no users / workers. The operator of this pool seems authentic and does not hide with excuses and any lies, at least so my subjective first impression. The test run with 100 TH/s worked well, the statistics were also displayed very promptly on the dashboard. Worker names are possible here. The biggest advantage is, of course, that here the smallest fee of only 0.4% is expressed. I think this pool has potential, I will continue to monitor him and if some day a block hit will occur on this pool and the payout is successful without problems, then I will also try it out.

Con:
He has only one server and therefore only one location (Europe). The pool only offers varDiff and fixed values for lowDiff/highDiff, customDiff is not possible. He had used misleading DNS names in the beginning, which should pretend another location. But after that was met with criticism in his support thread, he probably removed that. In his thread I had asked him why there was no display for "best share diff" and "best ever" and he contacted me privately and explained that this was a side project for him (but for such stuff he probably has time and desire) and what the difference between "best share" and "best ever" was. Questionable how to interpret that...hmm ? For a long time no update or answer came in his thread, only the other day when I asked him again he replied on it. His response however was less impressive, so I lost a bit of sympathy with this pool. He falls into self-pity and takes on the victim role, complaining that he does this in his spare time. I don't want to know what happens if someone ever finds a block, the payoff is hanging somewhere and he argues on such grounds. I hope that his attitude to this will change, time will tell ...

Coinbase transaction verification:

NOK --> The check fails, it seems like a json_rpc_call is not compatible with the miner (cgminer). Thus, my miner's decoding attempt to extract information about the built Coinbase transaction fails. This is a bad sign for me, which is why I have to change my following conclusion to negative afterwards.

Conclusion:
In his thread he tries strenuously to advertise his pool, but the response is still low. The soloblocks.io pool is quite new (only 5 months old) and according to that he certainly doesn't have it easy. It is a pity that there is no "best share" and "best ever" integrated in the statistics yet, hopefully this will come in the future. It would be just as good if he offered alternative servers. In the internet unfortunately you don't find any reports or other info to this pool, there are only two worker in use (presumably its own), this pool seems not be used at all. Since this pool has never found a block I will avoid it for now. If his pool ever finds a block and the user gets the reward without complaint and his pool gains a good reputation, I will consider soloblocks.io again.
EDIT: After the Coinbase verification failed, I cannot trust this pool and will avoid it. I will try have already tried to contact the pool operator and clarify this point. The pool operator jack3rror is already tinkering and I'm curious what will come out of it, I'll keep you posted.... Until the final clarification I mark this pool with an orange flag (orange flag) and should the problem be solved or clarified to the positive, I will adjust the info to this pool again.

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zsolo.bid (0.5%) !!!CAUTION!!! Do not use !!!

Pro:
Clean and clear website. You can mine directly here via own Bitcoin address so no registration is required. Apparently, this pool has a total hashrate of 170 PH/s according to its own data, which is definitely something to be proud of if this is really true. So this could mean that many users mine here and trust the pool.

Con:
When sending hash power to this pool, it takes a really long time to even see info in the dashboard at some point. After 11min I got info displayed on the dashboard at all. This is very unusual and I haven't encountered it with any other pool so far. Also with this pool "best share" and "best ever" is not displayed. Since I'm a bit skeptical about the displayed total hashpower of ~170 PH/s I checked with the instructions of the pool operator soloblocks.io to see which string this zsolo.bid pool uses. It is the hex value 0a4d696e696e67636f7265 which corresponds to the text "miningcore". This term doesn't mean anything to me and I couldn't find any blocks containing this text in the BTC blocklist either. Please correct me if I am wrong with this. But if this would really be as shown here, then it also means that this pool has not found a single block in solo mining mode yet. Also no info here in the forum or in the net can be found about it. This again is in controversy with the displayed high total hashrate. So I personally evaluated this as zsolo.bid 'trying to trick around' with the indication of its user/total hashrate, so I list this point as a negative. But as I said, I'm happy to be proven right and am all ears in this regard.

coinbase transaction verification:
6.25051475999997 BTC will go to 1982Ehhado9a2znLevwTiaECDFXpNajT9N

NOK! !!!WARNING!!! --> The payout address belongs to the pool operator! If you would hit a block on this pool, then the full reward including the contained transaction fees goes to the mentioned payout address, the miner would receive nothing to his specified mining address. Since this address currently shows no balance, this can mean two things: either no single block has been found so far or the pool operator periodically changes the payout address after each block hit in his pool software to a new payout address, so that no reference can be made and he thus tries to conceal his activities. This also confirms my original suspicion that the stated hashrate is faked, as well as my suspicion based on the layout and the general concerns I had listed under the "Con:" section. I would definitely not mine here and give this solomining pool a wide berth!

Conclusion (old):
I don't see any advantage here compared to the soloblocks.io pool presented so far, which would also be cheaper in fees. Also, I can't find any clue or info about the operator(s), also they don't seem to be represented here in the forum the way soloblocks.io or solo.ckpool.org are for example. Therefore for me rather uninteresting.

Conclusion:
Do not use this pool in any case because you would not get a single Satoshi even if you find a block! The users are asked to mine with their own Bitcoin address, which gives the impression that here, as usual with a block hit, would be paid out to the own payout address. But this will not happen, you will stand empty and are the victim. This smells strongly of SCAM, hence RED FLAG at this point. By the way, this is exactly the same payout address as listed by the scammer pool btcmill.io below. Since the website layouts of zsolo.bid, luckymonster.pro and btcmill.io are very similar, I suspect that the same scammers are behind these pools. Hands off this pool!

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luckymonster.pro (0.5%) !!!CAUTION!!! Do not use!!!

Pros:
Clean website presence and well laid out. Pool hashrate for BTC is currently 56.3 PH/s with 108 workers online at this time.

Con:
Again, no info in the stats about "best share" or "best ever", at least you can see how many shares were submitted. Not a single post related to this pool to be found here in the forum or somewhere else.

Review of coinbase transaction:
6.2508409800000004 BTC go to 161Z7UgkGQg3shBPTFVd2AkwtpewYS3aGK

NOK! !!!WARNING!!! --> The payout address belongs to the pool operator! If you would hit a block, then the full reward including the contained transaction fees goes to the mentioned payout address, the miner would receive nothing to his specified mining address. Since this address currently shows no balance, this can mean two things: either no single block has been found so far or the pool operator periodically changes the payout address after each block hit in his pool software to a new  payout address, so that no reference can be made and he thus tries to conceal his activities. I would definitely not mine here and give this solomining pool a wide berth!

Conclusion (old):
Again the same, I don't see any advantage over the previous favorite soloblocks.io pool --> Therefore uninteresting for me.

Conclusion:
Do not use this pool in any case because you would not get a single Satoshi even if you find a block! The users are asked to mine with their own Bitcoin address, which gives the impression that here as usual with a block hit, would be paid out to the own payout address. But this will not happen, you will stand empty and are the victim. This smells strongly of SCAM, hence RED FLAG at this point. By the way, this is exactly the same payout address as listed by the scammer pool btcmill.io below. Since the website layouts of zsolo.bid, luckymonster.pro and btcmill.io are very similar, I suspect that the same scammers are behind these pools. Hands off this pool!

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kano.is (0,5 %)

Pros:
Multiple server locations and ports are available. The pool operator Andrew (Kanoi) aka Kano has a support thread here in the forum. Besides varDiff/lowDiff/highDiff, customDiff is also supported, as well as freely selectable worker names. The pool also offers a lot of statistic data and info pages about solomining. Kano has profound knowledge, which he uses in his project. He has also written the drivers/support for the GekkoScience miners, which he includes in his cgminer version.

Con:
Direct mining with bitcoin address is not supported, therefore high risk with such a 1 man pool. Add to that the fact that his solo pool has not found a single block yet and there is also no experience if and to what extent a solo miner would receive his reward at all. Another big negative aspect is that Kano strictly blocks all firmware versions of ASIC/software miners on his pool, which, according to his own statement, use custom firmware and thus not the standard firmware from the manufacturer. This leads to the fact that rented hash power from most rigs does not even get through to the Kano pool and you pay for nothing and time runs against you. This is not only counterproductive for a solo miner but also cost driving because there is no mining going on. He not only constantly rants about CK but also rants about other pools or those who want to start new with a pool. He preachily attacks other pools' advertising claims that you don't mine anonymously (even though everyone knows and is even explicitly told for example here 'You remain anonymous apart from your btc address'). But he himself forces his users to get an activation key for using his Discord server, which allows him as operator a direct assignment of Discord username <--> Kano pool username --> Ugh! The lousy reputation that Kano as a person brings with him and is unmistakable here in the forum in various contributions is the strongest negative point.

Coinbase transaction testing:
I tested all the servers offered by this pool and all of them delivered the same payout address.

6.33685210999997 BTC go to 1Cz6q6YqxmXbV8aFnQKFftMykFFBdt1Jtw

NOK --> as you can clearly see here, the reward are not paid out to the user but go to Kano's address. Since this pool also offers PPLNS you can see that he has found several blocks in the past. For me, however, the Kano pool is uninteresting for solo mining, because you have to register here and do not mine with your own Bitcoin address but with a username. In case of a block hit, the reward first goes to Kano, as you can see from the Coinbase review above, and that would then have to be paid out to the user in the next step. For me, this is a no-go, which is why I can not recommend the pool for solo mining.

Conclusion:
Although this pool was excluded for me from the beginning for solo mining because it does not allow direct mining with own Bitcoin address, I was curious and took it under a test because it seemed favorable with 0.5% and should supposedly provide a lot of statistics info. Unfortunately, the contra points are heavyweight and also outweigh in number. I would not like to hit a block and have to watch in the blockchain how the reward for my found block would first be paid to Kano (because his payout address is stored and the reward goes to him first) and if he then e.g. dies in an accident the coins will never find their way to me because they are lying around on his wallet. With ViaBTC you wouldn't have to worry about that, even though you can't mine directly with your own address. Because ViaBTC is not a one-man pool and if someone goes down, the store will most likely continue to run because it is a completely different league and dozens of people work there. So I don't want to risk Kano getting my reward and not being able to pay out to me if something would happen to him e.g. him as a person or possibly his pool would be compromised or anything else similarly bad. On Kano himself: He had probably co-developed hardware driver parts in cgminer - the mining software known in the scene. The developer and founder of cgminer (Con Kalivas, CK Pool operator) had personal differences with Kano and "kicked him out" and locked him out from further co-development. Kano has been pissed off ever since and not only constantly bashes CK here in the forum or against projects related to CK, but also in his own Discord server where he is defended by his few disciples. Kano obviously can't take criticism, plus he's constantly ranting at others and thus trying to make himself look better. He moans about how the whole world except him can't program, he talks ironically and condescendingly about others. To Nicehash he says and propagates "Fuckhash", MiningRigRentals are also all frauds, and all are stupid because they do not understand anything of the connections ... I think this also justifies the very high turnover rate of his potential users, who sooner or later expose him. In Kanos' Discord server, a Blockfinders.Run (SOLO-FUN-RUN) takes place regularly, managed by the user Wiggie45. I have noticed that every time after such a run is finished after about a day, Kano and Wiggie45 are remarkably positive about the run and really motivate people to participate in the next run again. If open slots are open for a longer time, Kano or he himself with double-occupied participation thus take over the slots so that the run can start. Strangely enough, Kano also regularly resets his database (KDB) after a run, which resets certain statistical data on his website, Kano says he does this for some maintenance purpose. Strikingly also that the hash rate rented with NH for these Runs fails without exception with each run in the middle or decreases and thereupon Kano constantly explains or defends the circumstance. Although, as expected, only the organizer wiggie45 should comment on this, because he organizes and rents everything for the group. Personally, it seems to me that Kano and wiggie45 work hand-in-hand and some internal deals exist for these solo fun runs. Also noticeable is the cooperation with the users "sidehack" (=GekkoScience Compac F developer) and "419mining" (=distribution of the Compac F), there stinks heavily of surreptitious advertising what you read so. Generally nothing forbidden, but that clouds the image of Kanos' pool additionally because one could suspect profit and greed, so at least my subjective impression. Someone had even commented and rumored that Hashrate sent to a pool would be diverted for own purposes, but that would mean a shortcoming for all pools, but I had heard it in connection with this pool which is why I mention it here. What further keeps me from supporting Kano is the fact that he is becoming more and more closed-source for himself and doesn't want to disclose anything. He vehemently refuses with unsustainable reasons (=excuses) to include patches in his current cgminer version, which allows to use own full-nodes for solomining. Obviously he wants to avoid this or intentionally ensures it so he can advertise his own pool. For me personally, therefore, an absolute no-go, which is why I have unfortunately dropped this pool. It's a pity, because Kano could have made much more out of it with his expertise, especially if he was positive and charitable.

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aminingpool.com (0.95%)

Con:
No pros, pool is down, website is cheap and claptrap and nothing works without JavaScript. Does not give me a confidence-inspiring impression and is therefore mercilessly excluded for further consideration.

Conclusion:
Hands off.

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btc.solomining.io (1%)

Pros:
Website is clean and structured with plenty of explanations and info. There are multiple distributed server locations offered. CustomDiff is supported, which can be specified using a password in the format d=xxxxxx. Pool status retrievable via API, there are about 45 users mining here, 75 workers and the overall hashrate is around 1 PH/s. There has been a total of 1 block found on this pool so far. The pool offers many statistics and information, such as ">directly via URL its own statistics of the miner to retrieve. There are many info displayed, including "best share" but no "best ever". The pool made a good impression on me and the fact that a block has already been found and successfully paid out reinforces the whole thing.

Con:
When I switched back from another pool later and sent the hashpower to this pool, unfortunately the synchronization between rig and pool did not happen anymore. I tried everything to death: different servers of this pool, different diff connections tried, varDiff, customDiff and also as password "nicehash" for highDiff configuration.... Nothing worked. I then redirected to three other solo pools for testing, there the sync worked right away and the hashpower was transmitted. Then back to this btc.solomining.io but just did not work. If you mine your rig here continuously and everything works, well and good, but you would have to hope that the connection never breaks down (whether intentionally or unintentionally) because that could mean that no more resync is managed. On their Discord server, even after 4 days, I didn't get an answer to the described problem. This has of course very much clouded my impression on the pool, this is a big negative point, which I would not like to experience in productive operation. I must therefore honestly mention this experience here as a negative point. Hash power then again directed to another pool, has worked without any problems ergo a problem at btc.solomining.io

coinbase transaction verification:

-> see their different servers offered, all servers delivered the same payout addresses

6.19383345999996 BTC go to
0.0625639699999997 BTC go to 3919a9nfJaZFidUYALj4ExV9ob2GrCjZyf

O.K. --> one would receive the reward to one's own payout address in case of a block hit. If you look at this address of the pool operator, you can see that a block has been found and paid out here before.

Conclusion:
It's a pity that I had to make the experience with the faulty connection, because this pool would have been my next favorite after soloblocks.io because it offers many features. However, no info on the operator can be found, no reports or posts here in the forum. And since on their Discord support channel no one -but really no one- reports (also other newcomers have reported and asked questions that remained unanswered for days), I have therefore filtered out this pool due to lack of trust, although a block has been found here before.

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btcmill.cc (1 %) !!!ATTENTION!!! Do NOT use!!!
Pro:
Pool hashrate 19.6 PH/s with 21 miners and 36 workers online looks good, but I wonder if it's true?

Con:
As you can clearly see, the same layout as luckymonster.pro which means either the same people are behind it or they had their pool installed and configured as a service. To me this doesn't look very serious.

Verification of coinbase transaction:
6.28003633999997 BTC goes to 1982Ehhado9a2znLevwTiaECDFXpNajT9N

NOK! !!!WARNING!!! --> The payout address belongs to the pool operator! If you would hit a block, then the full reward including the contained transaction fees goes to the mentioned payout address, the miner would receive nothing to his specified mining address. Since this address currently shows no balance, this can mean two things: either no single block has been found so far or the pool operator periodically changes the payout address after each block hit in his pool software to a new  payout address, so that no reference can be made and he thus tries to conceal his activities. I would definitely not mine here and give this solomining pool a wide berth!

Conclusion:
Do not use this pool in any case because you would not get a single Satoshi even if you find a block! The users are asked to mine with their own Bitcoin address, which gives the impression that here as usual with a block hit, payouts would be made to the own payout address. But this will not happen, you will stand empty and are the victim. This smells strongly of SCAM, hence RED FLAG at this point. By the way, this is exactly the same payout address as listed by the pool zsolo.bid mentioned above.Since the website layouts of zsolo.bid, luckymonster.pro and btcmill.io are very similar, I suspect that the same scammers are behind these pools. Hands off this pool!

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ViaBTC.net (1 %)

Pro:
Detailed help pages and support, as this is a really big and renowned provider with a corresponding reputation. ViaBTC offers other port numbers such as 443 or 25 for connectivity. This is not a 1-man operation but a larger company that has been in existence for a very long time and is in the upper league.

Con:
To as well known and large the provider may be and enjoys its reputation.... With ViaBTC you are enforced to register and do not mine with your own bitcoin address directly, but just via a username with the resulting and serious disadvantages.

Verification of coinbase transaction:
6.36279315999998 BTC goes to 18cBEMRxXHqzWWCxZNtU91F5sbUNKhL5PX

NOK --> as you can clearly see here, then the mined coins are not paid out to the user but go to ViaBTC in first place.

Conclusion:
I had previously mined on ViaBTC (and Antpool, etc.) in PPLNS/PPS mode for another test, which is why the following attached screenshots may still contain artifacts of it in the graphs, but this should not bother. ViaBTC is one of the big renowned pools that also offers solo mining as an alternative, which is why I quickly tested ViaBTC with its solo mining option for this experience report. However, ViaBTC is not interesting for me for solo mining, because you have to register here and do not mine with your own Bitcoin address but with a username. In case of a block hit, as you can see above from the Coinbase review, the reward first goes to viaBTC and they would then have to pay out to the user in the next step. For me, this is a no-go, which is why I cannot recommend the pool for solo mining. Your mileage may vary.

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mining-dutch.nl (1,5 %) und prohashing.com (1,99%)

Con:
I didn't even test these two pools because it is mandatory to register here and you can't mine with your own bitcoin address. Also, way too high fees.

Conclusion: in my eyes there is not a single reason to include these two pools in the further consideration.

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solo.ckpool.org (2 %)

This solo pool is probably known to most people in the scene, because it exists for a very long time (since 2014-08-31), is popular and has a good reputation. Besides varDiff/lowDiff/highDiff, customDiff is also supported, as well as freely selectable worker names. Con Kolivas (Wikipedia) has a good reputation here in the forum, which is reflected e.g. in his support thread (part 1) and support thread (part 2). He also offers the open source code of the pool for free download and viewing. This Solo pool has found the most blocks in the Solomining category to date, totaling a whopping 267 blocks as of today. There is no other competing solo mining pool that can hold a candle to solo.ckpool.org in this regard. I think all these points lead to the fact that the masses trusted and continue to trust this pool. This is also reflected in its pool statistics, there are a whopping 2,808 users active in total with 14,880 workers with current total hashrate of 66 PH/s (still a whopping 22 PH/s on weekly average). And this despite the fact that this pool is the most expensive of all the comparable ones with the 2% fees. That's something I would say. With the solo-CK-Pool you have the possibility to retrieve the various statistic data via direct URL. An automatic update of the data is not done by, but you can manually reload the page (refresh/F5) and you get once per 60sec. the new data displayed. So you can always see your own record and how well or badly you have progressed in your mining progess. The output is simple and works very well even with mobiles on the go. What I still like about soloCK Pool --> Con Kolivas publishes in case of a found block on his Solo-CK-Pool here in the forum in his support thread the statistics/info if a solo miner has successfully mined a block (in this linked example the last found block from 06.09.2022 of a lucky solo miner). This provides transparency but also trust. With no other pool you ever have the possibility to see with which hash rate the lucky miner has found the block and derive further information from it. Through this publication, everyone has the opportunity to see this. Con Kolivas is a programmer since the 80's and has been involved in the Linux kernel for over 30 years, I think he knows something about programming. Most of the solominers out there use his pool, that's the biggest plus I would say.

Con:
One negative point is the relatively high fee of 2%. The other negative point worth mentioning would be the fact that a user "lost" a block in 2020 on this pool because a backup was running on the CKpool at that time and the server was overloaded. This meant that the actually valid block could not be sent to the network in a timely manner and thus became a stale. The miner was not able to receive a payout despite a valid block being found. The pool operator has made a public statement in his thread and paid the miner a small compensation amounting to twice the mining costs.

Review of coinbase transaction:
6.17903019999997 BTC go to .
0.126102650000001 BTC go to 1PKN98VN2z5gwSGZvGKS2bj8aADZBkyhkZ

O.K. --> Thus, coincides with the statement of the pool operator.

Quote

2% goes to 1PKN98VN2z5gwSGZvGKS2bj8aADZBkyhkZ to operate the pool and contribute to further ckpool code maintenance.

Conclusion:
The pool was developed and operated by Con Kolivas, an anesthesiologist and programmer from Australia, who also developed the software miner cgminer, which is well known in the scene. He has a good reputation and his pool has found the most blocks in solo mining so far. He has been in the business for over a decade and has appropriate knowledge in the field. This pool is therefore my personal favorite because I trust him the most and can mine here with a clear conscience, despite the higher fee of 2% that I accept for it.

---

Personal conclusion:
At first I only knew solo.ckpool.org, but the high 2% fee had put me off, which is why I wanted to think outside the box. After all the forays and excessive testing, I finally decided to go with solo.ckpool.org, despite the highest fee. Simply justified in the fact that it is the only solo pool that has found dozens of blocks and there are also confirmations about it here in the forum. With a current reward percentage of 6.25 BTC per block find, a lot of trust belongs to the pool. Of course, a lot of impressions flowed in on me during the long test period, but for now I will continue to mine at CKpool and beyond that also watch soloblocks.io and consider when the time comes that blocks are found there. If you want to gather additional info beyond this thread, feel free to follow the pool section here in the forum.

Finally, I would like to point out that I am absolutely satisfied with MRR so far and will continue to use MRR to rent hash power for solo mining. I don't get anything from them for writing positively about my experience here and thus indirectly advertising them. If you are considering to use MRR and want to register there, then I would be happy if you would use my referral ID 2691223 for your registration. You will not have any disadvantages, it is as if you would have registered normally without a referral. However, if you use me as a referral user, then I will receive perks of some kind in return. So if you found this thread here useful and would like to thank me in some small way, then I would also be happy if you would use my referral link for your registration. <3-ful thanks for it in advance!

I hope this long, but detailed experience report can support one or the other like-minded and interested in the selection or answer many questions. As always, all information is without guarantee, these were my personal experiences and impressions. Have fun and good luck at solo-mining.

citb0in

Hello mining friends

I would like to tell you about my experiences, adventures and impressions I have made in the last weeks/months regarding solo mining. This should serve as a guide but also as a review for like-minded people who are facing similar problems and are looking for answers or want to share their own experiences.  It is not meant to be a manual, as it would go beyond the scope, although I will elaborate on some points I consider worth mentioning. If you want to learn more about the technologies presented here, you are of course free to do your own research and, if you have any questions feel free to create new posts of your own about them. For the following thread I would like to emphasize that all impressions I describe in the course are purely subjective, they show my personal opinion and this does not imply that it has to correspond to the fact or other views. I also refer exclusively and without exception always to Bitcoin, as I do not care about alt-/shitcoins and thus do not support them.

1) Requirements --> hash power for SHA-256 .

An indispensable condition for solo mining is -who would have thought it- hash power! Either you own your own hardware like ASIC miners (e.g. Bitmain Antminer, MicroBT Whatsminer, Canaan Avalonminer, etc.) or USB miners specially developed for the SHA256 algorithm (e.g. Gekkoscience Compac F, NewPac, etc.) or you rent the required hash power from one of the two well-known providers/marketplaces: MiningRigRentals.com or www.NiceHash.com. The principle behind these hashpower marketplaces is simple: ASIC miner owners can choose to use their hashpower themselves for mining or instead offer all or part of their device's hashpower for rent from MRR or NH. Understandably, the rental prices on the marketplaces are slightly higher than the rewards the ASIC miner owner would receive if they were to mine with PPLNS/PPS themselves. Therefore, many ASIC miner owners offer their hashpower for rent. Customers, on the other hand, are happy to accept the extra charge because they can scale very precisely when and how much hashpower they need. In addition, everything is included in the agreed rental price, the renter does not pay for electricity and does not have to deal with the loud noises that such an ASIC miner generates during operation.

Since I don't own any mining hardware at this point, I have to rent the hash power I want. I couldn't decide at first, but after reading a lot of forum posts here, or on Reddit and other sources, I initially chose NiceHash, simply because there was more reading material and experience reports. It gave me the impression that NiceHash was bigger/well known.

2) NiceHash.com (abbreviated as NH in the following)
So first I created an account with NH and tried to get an overview. First I "funded" my account with a not insignificant BTC amount by transferring from my private wallet to the NH wallet of my account. Nowhere in the deposit process does NH mention that 2FA is mandatory for a later withdrawal, but more on that later. Then I wanted to rent Hashpower from NH. Unfortunately, this turned out to be anything but easy, as I find the system rather confusing and not intuitively self-explanatory. The list presented under "Hashpower Marketplace" is difficult to interpret for a newcomer at first glance. There are roughly structured two markets displayed called "USA - WEST" and "EU WEST". For each of these 5 columns are shown: , , , and , see the following screenshot.



For a newbie not everything is understandable and certainly not intuitive, because you can't click or even select anything at first glance. If you look at this line, for example ...



Then you understand that the ORDER ID is an 8-digit hex value that is supposed to hide the origin of the provider(s) for anonymity reasons. The column "PRICE per BTC/PH/DAY" is also understandable, it simply means that per Petahash 0.0044 BTC will be charged for the rental period of 24h. What the column "LIMIT" and "MINERS" should express, however, was mysterious to me at first. Afterwards I could find an explanation in the NH help pages. There it is explained that with NH you do not explicitly rent a single ASIC miner from a single person X, but that it is hashpower put together from several providers and machines. With Limit, it sort of sets the upper limit of hashpower in PH/s that one can choose when booking. And Miners shows how many individual mining machines this offer consists of.

After a bit of trial-and-error, I found that if you hover over the "Price BTC/PH/Day" column, a green checkmark with an arrow appears, and if you touch it with your mouse pointer, the text "Outbid order" appears. And here comes a crucial information to keep in mind when using NH:.

In the NH marketplace, everything is based on the system of bid and ask, i.e. the highest bidder gets the hash power. So you have to place your bid to rent the hashpower of a rig. So if one has placed an order and received hashpower and it has been sent to the desired pool, then everything is going so far for now. However, if you are suddenly outbidby someone else on the NH marketplace, then you have no hashpower anymore and are left standing because the highest bidder has "snatched" this hash power away. He simply bid more for it, so he got the hashing power. Of course, this is then no longer charged for and you also only pay for the service you receive, at least that's how fair it is. As soon as the other higher bidder is done or is no longer willing to pay as much and quits and you are therefore at the top of the NH queue, it continues again and you receive hash power again. Then the billing also continues accordingly. Despite everything, this condition should always be taken into account for one's own planning.

My overall impression and conclusion about Nicehash:

for several reasons for me an absolute no-no:

   - in order to be able to rent hashpower from NH, the customer is forced to go through KYC and drop his pants. Since I do not support this in principle and am strictly against it, it was already the KO criterion to continue to operate on this platform. I must honestly confess that I should have informed myself more thoroughly on their help pages beforehand. But I didn't even begin to expect that "renting hashpower" would require KYC for such insignificant simple actions. I was obviously mistaken.

   - i wanted to withdraw the high BTC amount back from NH by transferring it back to my private wallet. However, that was not possible and caused further trouble. NH forces one to set up two-factor authentication (2FA) to transfer amounts out of NH anywhere Bottomless cheek! Funnily enough, I was not forced[/i] to 2FA when I made the deposit, they accepted that without a hitch. But when paying out, they deliberately make it difficult. In short: To deposit funds into the NH platform they like to see, to release amounts that leave the NH platform again --> they obviously don't like to see that and make it more difficult for the customer intentionally by such hurdles. I don't like such "policies", that is for me no-go!.

   - I have followed dozens of solo mining parties that were carried out using hashpower on Nicehash. In doing so, I myself was able to follow the progress of hash power, shares, best share, etc... in detail, even though you don't have to have participated yourself. More about this later, in the section Kano-Pool. A run of about one day shows dozens of dropouts, interruptions and partial standstill for several hours. The reason for this was already mentioned above -> NH works on a bidding system and if someone overbids then the hash power is "snatched" away from you and you are left with 0 hashes/second. This is unreliable for the following reasons:

• (a) Let's assume a big difficulty increase of the bitcoin network is coming up in the next 25h, which everyone can see and estimate. But I still want to try my luck in the current difficulty class and mine for 24h with a huge hashing power. I rent this with NH and off I go. After about 6h I get outbid and so I don't hash at all. The one who outbid me is done after 17h and I slip back to the highest bidder and get my booked computing capacity again. This would theoretically run for me for another 18h (6h I have already used) but at this point after 1h the difficulty has been increased and I have no more interest in mining due to the blatant difficulty increase. I stand there stupidly, bag to, thing run. Finally, it means for me as a renter, I can not set a guaranteed rental period and thus can not reliably plan and calculate in the long term.
• (b) I can't do proper costing and long-term planning because the potential rental of hashpower has no 'fixed' costs can be allocated. I don't mean the general and usual market rice fluctuations but simply the fact that I don't have stable values for calculating rig/hashpower rent due to this supply/demand system. This is the logical conclusion from point a) because both price and time are assigned as a function.
  
• (c) There is no evidence or criteria in NH that meaningfully represents the state of a rig (or rig aggregation that is behind the anonymized "Order ID") to enable an assessment of reliability. Due to the lack of a rating system, it is not possible for the customer to roughly estimate whether the rigs will actually work reliably for the rented period without considerable hashrate fluctuations or even failures when they go offline (for whatever reason). In my opinion there is only one small approach to counteract this -> The value of the column "Miners" from the offer list should be as high as possible when selecting an Order ID. This way it does not matter much if e.g. 2 out of 139 miners would fail.
  

3) MiningRigRentals (hereafter abbreviated to MRR)

Since it was crystal clear to me that I would never use Nicehash for the first time, that left only MRR, easy choice So, registered there and looked around what MRR has to offer. Right away I got along much better here, everything worked intuitively and it was very clear to my sensation. Click on [Marketplace] and then click in the search box and start typing, when you get to SHA2.... all three available algorithms are displayed as hits:



Relevant to Bitcoin, the two hits colored in red are "Sha256" and "SHA256 Asicboost", with the latter offering better rents and usually being cheaper.
Here is a sample overview for the SHA256-ASIC rigs (as of 10/15/2022 / around 7:30pm):



When you select a rig, you get quite a bit of information displayed about it and can get an idea of whether it is a reliable rig and will keep the offered hash rates over the long term. For example the following rig (freely chosen by me, is now not necessarily a favorite of mine, so just random selection for demonstration purposes):



We see the location (US-EAST) for this rig. This is not irrelevant, as some pool operators allow you to choose certain pool servers located in other regions / countries / continents. The goal should be to have the shortest possible latency between the rig and the pool, as this can be the deciding factor for (failure) success. If I rent a rig in Russia and send the hashpower to a pool on the US west coast, it could be that the connection is much worse than choosing a pool server in the EU. In the worst case it can be that you have found a block, but until it is fed into the network and propagated it took too long, someone else was faster and you stand there stupidly without reward (orphan block). I just want to point out that it can be helpful to know the server location of the rig so that you can later adapt it to the server locations of the mining pool you are using, if the pool you are using offers this possibility at all. In the screenshot we also see the operator of this rig, I find this very helpful, why? I maintain an excel list for all my rentals I have done so far. I can make notes on them and very quickly and accurately filter out the good rigs from the bad. If I see certain "owners" with whom I have had bad experiences in the past because they responded late or even unfriendly to my inquiry about a problem, then I set internally "red flag" on these owners or also specifically on the Rig ID. I then avoid renting the same owner or rig again in the future. In the field "Suggested Diff" the rig owner can enter a Difficulty, which should be used as a guideline. So the person who wants to rent the rig knows if it is a lowDiff or HighDiff. In some pools you can also set the Diff, so you can select the right adjustment in advance so that everything goes smoothly in highspeed. The value under "Optimal Difficulty" is automatically calculated by MRR for the respective rig in such a way that 2-3 shares per minute are processed. This ensures the best possible throughput and a solid average performance. If the difficulty would be tuned higher, less shares per minute would come through and this would cause a rather fidgety course of the plot in the long run (also in the charts). The charts are an important basis to show reliability. In the above posted screenshot you can see in the upper chart window the live hashrate for the short-term time range.The blue area shows the 5min average and thus the largest swings. The black line the 30min average and the green line the 60min average. For the long-term view and thus the reliability one looks at the lower chart. The blue filled area shows the short term 5m average at the time shown, the black line the 30m average with a more smoothed line. Also, the red dashed line in both chart areas marks the hashrate advertised by this rig (500 TH/s in the example). So you look at the bottom chart, the black line should be at least above or around the red dashed line. This gives you great reliability that the advertised hashrate will be consistently achieved and delivered over the long term.

The upper chart shows the live hashrate, it serves as a quick assessment of whether everything is running ok or there could be any problems. In principle, it behaves like this: it may be that the rig briefly delivers less than the 500 TH/s advertised here, but it delivers a higher hashrate sometime later. Here again a screenshot I made a little later from the same rig. There you can see that the live hashrate was once briefly below the red-dashed one, but then shot up again and delivered 634 TH/s. The averages are relevant.



In the example, you have to rent for at least 24h and can rent for a maximum of 72h. The lowest possible rental period for MRR in general is 3h and on top there is no fixed limit as far as I know, or the rig operator can set it very high. Through the Quick Calculator you can see immediately how much BTC it would cost if you would rent xx hours and yy minutes. What is also possible: you can extend during the rental period if you want to. That however to a small extra charge, which is accounted for in the form of a fee. However, this is displayed transparently when you want to book the "extension".

The tabs [Workers] and [Rental History] are also very useful. In "Workers" you can see directly which difficulty the respective worker is currently using and how the individual hash rates of the particular workers look like. This can be very useful if you use a pool that allows customDiff. You can see to what extent the rig and the pool have synchronized and work well or less well together. You can also see exactly which miner software/firmware and which ASIC miner is being used and also the location of each worker. In the [Rental History] tab you can get a good picture of how reliable the rental operations have been in the past. Green color means that the advertised hashrate was largely achieved (plus minus about 5% is within the tolerance range, I think). These values also form the RPI (Rig Performance Index), a benchmark whether the rig is reliable and delivers the advertised hashrate in the long run or not. You can also see how long the rigs have been rented in the past and also by which renter (unless the user has turned off this feature under their personal settings, so that anonymous is then displayed there).



Now let's move on to the pools and how to choose one ...

4) Which solo mining pool to choose?

I had initially looked at <https://btc.com/stats/pool?pool_mode=all> to get an overview of all available pools. However, it lists all possible pools that have already mined blocks. You can't see if the listed pool also offers solomining. Nevertheless, the information on this page is interesting, more on this later.



The pool that found the most blocks is "Unknown". Unknown because it contains all those mined blocks whose coinbase transacation content could not be matched to any known pool string. For example: If user "lucky_miner" is mining privately on his own full-node and finds a block, then he can write free text into the coinbase transaction, which then appears publicly in the coinbase transaction of that mined block. However, the major known mining pools (F2Pool, Antpool, Slushpool, Binance, ViaBTC, SoloCK...) use specific text patterns for the coinbase transaction and therefore unique identification is possible. In short, all blocks mined that cannot be uniquely identified and assigned to a pool appear as "Unknown". The top of this pool list is "F2Pool" as can be seen. After that comes "AntPool", "BTC.com", "Braiins Pool" (formerly Slushpool), "BTCguild", "ViaBTC", "Poolin", etc. The actual total hash rate of the pools cannot be taken from this page, but is completely irrelevant for solo mining.

Originally I thought that the column "Empty Blocks Count" or expressed in percentage "Percentage of Empty Blocks", shows the number of blocks that the pool lost and therefore did not pay out. But empty blocks are just blocks without any transaction except their own coinbase transaction. So it is still a mystery to me why this "empty blocks" column matters and is displayed on this page at all. Another important thing are the "stale shares". These are shares that the worker returned to the pool too late. An "orphan block" instead is a completed and actually valid block whose calculated hash value was below the difficulty target and thus would be valid, but it was propagated too slowly through the network. Someone else promptly also found a valid hash value and thus a valid block, and propagated it faster than you. The longest chain wins, the inactive part that did not make it is ignored by the network and a way (orphan) is formed, the too slowly propagated block is thus dropped, hence "orphan". For the miner, of course, this is a nightmare, as he has rejoiced too early. Therefore, miners and especially beginners should always be aware that it is actually a bad idea to mine from home with your private internet connection (DSL, cable) and your full node, even if you should have 1 GBit/s fiber connection or cable connection. It is and remains a private household and the connections to the Internet are always inferior to a connection of a server in the data center. The private computer goes through dozens of routers (hops) and gateways and its bandwidth is shared with hundreds/thousands of other users in the strand. Both the ASIC miner and the full-node should therefore be located as close as possible to a performant backbone. In addition to this, the novice miner may unknowingly further aggravate his position by using VPN or TOR connections for his mining project, or even WiFi. All reputable mining pools invest in potent hardware with a damn fast internet connection in different and thus multiple data centers/locations, with DDoS protection and much more.

For now, let's move on to the next info page to help us choose a pool for solo-mining...
https://MiningPoolStats.stream/bitcoin

This page shows us all pools in the default view sorted by the total hashrate of the pool. The data is obtained through API from the respective pools. Some pools simply don't have an API or deliberately don't want to query data from such services (e.g. Foundrydigital). Here is an example screenshot of what this looks like:



On top here is foundrydigital, as a private person I don't think you can participate there at all, here are really big fish on it with millions / billions of expensive equipment and really big mining farms. There are certain requirements here, so that one can participate in the pool at all. Therefore, there is no information about the different mining types that are provided, or returns, or number of miners. The other places in the top 5 are usually shared by Antpool, F2Pool, ViaBTC and Binance. So how do you use this information to choose a suitable pool for your mining project? Well, that depends on if you want to do solo mining or if you want to mine as PPS+ or PPLNS in a community. I had dedicated myself to all types and made my experiences with it.

However, this thread is supposed to be exclusively about solo mining, so I focus on filtering out the pools that offer solo mining.

We look in the [pool/fee] column and look for the pools that have the text SOLO with red font color. Next to it is the fee that goes to the pool operator. The information "Miner Count, DailyPPS, Min.Pay, Hashrate, Blocks, LastFound" are all irrelevant for solo mining.



I'm picking out the solo mining pools:

Code:

5. ViaBTC.net (1 %)
21. zsolo.bid (0,5 %)
22. luckymonster.pro (0,5 %)
23. btcmill.cc (1 %)
24. solo.ckpool.org (2 %)
26. kano.is (0,5 %)
27. mining-dutch.nl (1,5 %)
30. solomining.io (1 %)
36. soloblocks.io (0,4 %)
38. aminingpool.com (0,95 %)
43. prohashing.com (1,99 %)

... and sort ascending by pool fee:

Code:

soloblocks.io (0,4 %)
zsolo.bid (0,5 %)
luckymonster.pro (0,5 %)
kano.is (0,5 %)
aminingpool.com (0,95 %)
solomining.io (1 %)
btcmill.cc (1 %)
ViaBTC.net (1 %)
mining-dutch.nl (1,5 %)
prohashing.com (1,99 %)
solo.ckpool.org (2 %)

Most would probably intuitively opt for those with the smallest fee, so that they have to pay as few fees as possible in the event of a block hit and reward receipt and thus more goes into their own pockets.  But whether all that glitters is gold? What I describe now shows my approach and thoughts to it. The whole thing should ultimately serve as a suggestion and idea. I rented a cheap rig from MRR for the short duration of 3h and a hashrate of 100 TH/s which I then directed to each pool in turn and took some meaningful screenshots and documented my experiences. I tested each solo pool from this list so that I could filter out and then ultimately settle on one.

How do I evaluate and what criteria matter

Website:
First impression of the website? Does it look similar to already known websites or pools then I devalue it because the operator probably wanted to save time and quickly copied a layout and changed it slightly. I know that there are self-titled "crypto experts" on the Internet who offer as a service a ready installed and configured mining pool for a fee (by abusing open-source pools for this, ugh). They offer different packages at different prices, depending on the functionalities. Such layouts are immediately noticeable, especially if the operator has made an effort for customizing or not. I downrate if the website requires JavaScript. I usually rate positive, if a clean and neat design stands out, so that everything remains clear. I like it plain and simple, without a lot of bells and whistles and dozens of buttons and tabs or submenus. So that even on the go with the mobile phone can be accessed directly and quickly. I find it positive when the statistics data of the own miner can be called directly via URL. I rate it positive if I get the impression that the pool operator has made an effort to list as much helpful information as possible. I radically devalue if you are forced to register before using the respective pool.

Server location and availability:.
Most pools offer at least 1 server and 2 different port numbers (see following paragraph "Difficulty/Configuration"). A few of them offer additional port numbers, e.g. 443 or 25, which can be advantageous for some constellations, depending on where the miner is located and where it might not be possible or even allowed to connect via the high ports (>1024). Port 25 (SMTP) and 443 (TLS) are allowed by routers/firewalls with higher security. It could be that you have your own miner somewhere on a company site, but the network there blocks all outgoing traffic on unknown ports. In such a case you could try using port 443, as this - with a bit of luck - would be treated less restrictively by the company firewall. Furthermore, MRR requires that you have at least two servers configured as a pool so that in case of a pool problem MRR interface can automatically switch to the other one. Only then you are entitled to a refund in case of problems and complaints. I consider it positive if alternative ports are offered by the pool. It is also a plus if the pool offers not only one server but several distributed over the continents, preferably all as high-end computers in data centers with direct backbone connection.

Difficulty Configuration:
All pools I know of offer at least the "varDiff" functionality. This means that the pool gives the connected miner the jobs with an initial difficulty (initial diff) and then looks how long it takes. Most pools aim for about 2-3 shares per minute. They increase or decrease the difficulty accordingly, it's kind of automatically negotiated and coordinated between the two parties. However, if the "initial diff" seems too large for the miner during the initial negotiation by the pool, the two do not get on the green branch. Miners with higher computational capacities can understandably handle higher difficulties and, above all, faster. They need a high diff. That's why all known mining pools offer their users the option to use either lowDiff or highDiff. This is achieved by connecting to a different port number. This is described in the respective instructions of the pool. Then there is additionally the functionality "custom diff", this gives the user the possibility to define and set the desired difficulty manually, mostly via the password field in the format "d=123456" where the abbreviation 'd' stands for difficulty and the value is the desired value you want to configure. However, this should only be necessary in special cases, the automatic tuning usually works quite well, as long as you have chosen lowDiff or highDiff correctly. "VarDiff" and "lowDiff/highDiff via port number" is actually part of the standard, customDiff is not offered by all. I therefore consider it a small plus.

Freely selectable worker names to distinguish the individual runs:.
Most, but not all, of the solo mining pools presented here allow users to use user-defined worker names. These worker names are appended as a suffix to the user's own Bitcoin payout address, using a period (.) or underscore (_) as a separator. Example: the own bitcoin address to be used as payout address is bc1q111222333444 and the desired worker name would simply be bc1q111222333444.foo or bc1q111222333444_bar etc. Why do this? Quite simply, to distinguish and clearly separate the statistical data collected for the particular run for further analysis. For example, I run a solo run today by renting the hashpower 500 TH/s for 6h and pointing it to the solo pool and then I see in the statistics data of the pool how many shares I managed and what my highest share (best diff share) was. Let's say my 'best diff' was 271G. Tomorrow I rent hashpower again and send 2 PH/s for 12h to the same pool with my same bitcoin address. Inasmuch as I would not have exceeded the 'best diff' value of yesterday's run (of all previous runs), I would never see what my 'best diff' was for the current twelve hour run at 2PH/s if it was less than 271G. That's because the statistics would still display 271G. Also I can't distinguish and read out how many shares were transferred in the current run. Simply because each time the same bitcoin address was used and the data is cumulated (= merged). This circumstance can be circumvented by choosing worker names. In this case I would have chosen the worker name bc1q111222333444.500TH-6h for the first run and bc1q111222333444.2PH-12h for the second run to distinguish them... at least that's how I do it, of course it's up to everyone how to choose and handle worker names 

Direct mining via own Bitcoin address without registration:.
Absolute no-go is when the solo pool forces the user to register. It is not a matter of having to register with an e-mail address, but of mining using a user name that was used during registration. Consequently, in the event of a block discovery, the reward of currently 6.25 BTC is not paid directly to the user's own Bitcoin address, but only to the defined payout address specified by the solo pool owner. The pool operator has defined this statically for his pool, and this data is stored in the coinbase transaction. In practice, in case of a block hit this means that the pool operator collects the reward of 6.25 BTC + transcation fees in the first step itself and then only pays out to the respective user to the payout address requested by the user and entered in the customer portal. In the worst case, the mining pool operator could bitch and refuse the payout or put other hurdles in the way, such as forcing the user to first perform KYC before he pays out to him. Or the operator might die in an accident or due to illness, or the company (the solo pool) goes bust and everything ends up in a bankruptcy estate and you can only hope to get your reward that you are actually entitled to. I would definitely not take such risks with such high amounts of currently > 6.25 BTC. All pools without exception that do not allow direct mining with one's own private Bitcoin address are NO-GO and red flag, even though I included them for comparison in this test.

Statistics data and information on solo mining:.
While not a statement of potential success for mining a new block, I personally find the "best diff" and "best ever" stat info to be entertaining. "Best Diff" is the highest value achieved for one's bitcoin address/worker and is automatically reset to zero by the pool should the respective solo pool find a new block (regardless of which user on that solo pool). The "best ever" however remains, it will never be reset and shows the personal 'highscore' that has ever been reached under the given payout bitcoin address. You get a clue how good or bad your own run went and can compare in the future. Other useful information would be 'number of shares' and the 'current Difficulty' that the pool gives out to its workers. This is for performance purposes, you can see how many shares/min are processed at which diff. Accordingly, you could set the Miner<>Pool like this with e.g. customDiff to adjust these works to your taste and liking. Although it shows nothing about the chances of success, some may want to do it themselves and customize, so a lot of information provided is only an advantage and never a disadvantage. In the end, those who don't need certain info can simply ignore it. In short, if the pool provides as much info/statistic data as possible, then I consider that a plus.

Background information about the operator, presence and notoriety in the scene:.
I search the internet for all conceivable information about the pool in question. Primarily here on bitcointalk of course but I also look for clues or experiences on Youtube videos, Reddit posts, IRC servers or log onto their Discord servers and follow the conversations for several days/weeks.

Number of users+workers:
I look at how many users have joined this pool and tried their mining luck there. The pool operator could of course easily fake this data on their own pool website, but I still consider it as an approximate guideline to get an idea if the pool is in demand or if it's more of a flash in the pan. The overall hash rate of a solo pool has no significant meaning for a solo miner, as this performance has no relation to the success or failure for solo mining. It only says that a few or more miners are sending hash power to that solo pool to try their mining luck. Likewise, the indication of "users" or "workers", this only serves as a rough guide to assess the pool acceptance of the mining community.

Solo Pool Success Story
Probably the most critically considered and most important question in this context is: "Has the respective solo mining pool ever been successful, has a block already been found here and has the corresponding miner received his payout without complaint?" For this purpose, one can primarily make use of this BTC pool list, the interpretation of which, however, requires explanation so as not to mistakenly compare apples with oranges. One must know here that with this list all pools are listed without differentiating between solo pool mining or community pool mining where people mine as a group via PPLNS/PPS/etc. There are pools that offer both models (e.g. ViaBTC or Kano Pool). If you look at place 29 "KanoPool" in this list, for example, there is a value of 2,433 blocks in the "mined blocks" column. However, this does not (!) mean that so many blocks were mined in the KanoPool via solo mining. In reality, the Kano.is pool as solo mining has not found a single block so far. It has also only had the solo mining model in place about 1 year ago, prior to that it offered its services exclusively as PPLNS for years. The blocks shown were mined in the PPLNS model, the last block found in PPLNS mode was found by Kano on 10/25/2021 (see details here). Likewise, this list also does not tell us how many blocks the large ViaBTC pool found in solo mining mode. The data on this list is commingled, therefore no meaningfulness of the "mined blocks" column in terms of solo mining, so this important info should be kept in mind.