Topic: Mining: Why choose Solo or Pool? (Read 399 times)

Lol does people still mine solo these days? I don’t think so. Anyone who is going into mining these days should go for a pool mining, because, to be sincere, you can’t compete with those big miners out there if you should decide to go solo. I don’t think you can have the level of equipment that are required to be able to beat the bigger miners in the game. And moreover, if you’re mining solo I think the expenses will be more than what you will face when you’re mining with a pool; even those who mine with pools are complaining that the expenses are too much.

It is still up to you give it a try and know what’s better for you, but I know for sure you’re not going to beat those bigger miners unless you’re push lots of money into it turn into a big business, which is not something you’re looking forward to.

Where are you getting this info from? It's not true at all.

This should be in the alto section since you only solo mine altcoins.

Unless you plan on buying at least 1% of the total mining power in the world then solo mining is out. Just asking about it shows you don't understand.
You said with solo mining "He bear the cost of buying the equipment needed to mine." what are you talking about? It doesn't matter how you mine you are going to pay for it. The size only increases or decreases the ratio.

"The advantage of this form of mining is that the miner will keep all the reward to himself while the disadvantage is that it may take longer time to mine a block."

The fee you pay to a mining pool is so little compared to the amount you will get mining in a pool.

Basically just forget about solo mining it has no meaning.

There is power in number. The story behind numbers give such power to it. In a pool mining, I think they bring different skill set, resources together to make it a formidable and an aggregate resource that will increase their chance of success. That's the beauty of numbers.

Unfortunately very often after step3 entrepreneur disappears....

BTW it would be interesting to see how many solar panels you need to run a farm. Or how many cyclists-slaves (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triplets_of_Belleville)

Thanks for the in depth analysis and explanation of this critical subjects.

But here is what I want to correct. I don't want success in mining a block by a pool and failure in mining another block by a pool to be termed ' Luck' . yes we know its a game of probability but probability of success can be increased.

I believe if a smaller mining pool succeed in mining two blocks whereas a larger pool have not mine even one, it's purely based on some factors, strategies and knowledge which the smaller pool have over the larger pool.

That's where success lies and not luck...

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If an entrepreneur want to own a mining farm, this is what he will do.

1. He will write a well projected business plan.
2. He will meet investors and pitch to them.
3. He'll raise cash to own a solo mining.
4. He can now employ people experience in mining or crytro to work with him.

This is another way to own a profitable solo mining farm

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With regard to solo mine or joining a mining pool depends on how much money we have in establishing our mining farm.  If we wanted to solo mine then we better allocate millions of dollar in order to compete with the mining pool, if we don't have that budget then it is better to join a mining pool, why aim to solo the block reward if the possibility of finding a block in our current hashing power is less than 1% and this possibility will continue to decrease as the difficulty increases.  I think it is logical to join a mining pool or better to create a mining pool if we wanted to earn extra.  There is power in numbers we should always remember that.

Couple of months? The whole of 2020 they haven't found a single block! They are way past the average, they are just having a REALLY bad luck, and the opposite just occurred to another pool with even less hashrate that should on average find 1 block per year, but already found two in a row this year.

So yes, good luck for some, bad luck for others, in the end it all averages.

But what does this mean for the miner? Variance. With solo mining, you are playing this game alone, like you are your own pool. And your little hash rate probably means it will take you years (on average) to find a block. But you can be lucky, or not...

So those doing solo miner simply don't care to lose their money mining, its a lottery to them. You see many using obsolete miners in the unlikely event they get lucky and hit it.

When you are in a pool, you will get compensated according to the share of your hashing contribution. Higher hashrate pools find blocks more often and can pay more often.

So to simplify: solo mine means you might never see any reward while with a pool you are going to get a small but more constant reward.

PPLNS pools only pay when they actually find blocks, while the others (PPS) assume the risk to pay even without finding anything but need to keep a large sum as reserve always, which is why they have higher fees.

You are misunderstanding the core concept of mining. It isn't a simple choice of I will solo and make close to the same as if I joined a pool.

For example there is a pool that runs about 10PH at the moment they haven't hit a block in a couple months. There is no guarantee they will hit a block before the halving so in this instance there is a lot of lost potential earnings. Mining with a pool ensures you a more steady consistent payout stream - this can differ if you are PPS or PPLNS or any variation in between. You take a smaller cut of a lot more blocks to get a steady payout whereas you can gamble and go for the entire block solo and wind up doign really good or having nothing at all, there is no in between.

As for the gear used mining BTC everyone one is using some variation of an asic miner and trying to do it as efficiently and inexpensively as possible.

Further than that thre is no need to understand all the jargon going on behind the scenes in mining to be an "authority"  in crypto. You just have to understand what you are talking about and be able to explain it at different levels for different users. I have been mining for nearly 3 years now and I can't tell you anything useful about the math behind the scenes or even an accurate and useful definition of transaction selection for blocks. I do though have a decent cursory knowledge on the subject and can generally explain the overall rather well.

Pls,  you have gone deeper in this your comment and its good I and other people who love knowledge know more about some of what you said.
How do we explain constructing , mining and hashing as it relates to mining?

You also said that the equipment used by both solo and pool miners are thesame then how do pool miners achieve better results than the solo miners?

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That maybe true but the more technical the more the depth of knowledge one will have. You can't be an authority in crypto if you're not familiar with its complex or unique terminologies and jargon.



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Simple answer:

If you have the big guns capable of producing hundreds of thousands of terahash/second, opt for solo mining. Rewards would come in a lot less frequent but when you do, you get it all.

If you have the mining hardware but not enough to actually solve fast enough to get a block reward, consider yourself joining a big mining pool--and a PPLNS one at that--in order to at least get something out of the juice that your mining rigs are consuming.

There's really nothing hard to understand between pool mining and solo mining. Think of it as an extremely hard mathematics problem in a quiz bee wherein a super genius math dude (solo miner) compete against thousands of average and above-average Joes to get the reward/prize money.

Unless you have got an absolutely gigantic mining operation, mining solo simply isn't viable for most people.

The odds of successfully discovering a block is extremely low, considering that you'll contribute only a tiny fraction of the hash rate.

odds are that you'll only discover a block over several years, which means you'll need to pay electricity costs, maintenance costs and keep your hardware up to date over a long period of time before you eventually get rewarded.

Sure, you'll save the mining pool fee, but it's important to consider the time-value of money, and get your BTC earlier, rather than later, even if slightly reduced.

Solo miners and pool miners buy the same equipment.

The advantage of pool mining is that payouts are more frequent (but lower, so that the total is the same). This makes revenue more predictable. The disadvantage is that the miner generally pays the pool operator a fee. Pools also centralize Bitcoin to some extent..

Note that the terms "miner" and "mining" are ambiguous with respect to solo vs. pooled mining. There are two important components of mining -- constructing and publishing the block and hashing. A solo miner does both, but a pool miner just does the hashing while the pool operator constructs and publishes the block.

The choice between the two comes down to how long you can wait between payouts. Solo mining is more profitable because there is no pool operator taking a fee, but you have to manage the operating costs while you are waiting for a payout.

This is the correct explanation in easy to understand language.

Don't get confused by the technical jargons by the technical people. Understand one simple thing, mining will reward you only if you can find a block. If you can't find a block, your mining is of no use.

So in pool mining, you have a better chance to find a block as compared to solo mining.

Hope this helps!

I have a masters degree in sciences, I had to take an introduction in economics in my second bachelor, but that was more than 20 years ago... I must say that even after googeling, the best i came up with was the term "production function".
K = kapital
L = Labour

I'm out of my depth in an economic discussion (as mentioned above), but i suppose the kapital is decent ASIC's and cheap power, and the Labour is  studying, tuning and running these ASIC's.
An ASIC is pretty much plug-and-play, you make sure you have a mining room with shelves, A/C, power,... You buy the ASIC + PSU, plug everything in, go to the web gui, enter the pool info, and that's about it...

You need to know what you're doing and have very cheap power in order to mine succesfully, but the amount of Labour is defenately lower than the amount of Kapital.

Wow! What a detailed analysis. That's fully understood.
You know in a normal production the two required input are L and K.

Let's say the S17+ is the capital then don't the quality of the labour affect the probability of mining?

Block =f(K, L)

Since you're in the bitcoin discussion subforum, i'll give a bitcoin mining answer: 99,9% of the users seeking advice in this subforum should go for pool mining, unless they're looking at mining as a lottery ticket instead of a steady flow of income.

When you say:

you do not stress how much of an understatement this is for a "home" miner.

At current diff, an antminer S17+ (afaik, the latest generally available ASIC on the market) would (on average) take about 30 years to solve 1 block.

If you own 10 S17+'s, you'll only get "income" about once every 3 years (on average), unless the difficulty would drop... The power costs, on the other hand, would keep piling up.

If you have enough startup money to buy, let's say, >1000 S17+'s, you might consider solo mining a good alternative, since (on average) you'll solve a block every ~11 days, so once you have this kind of operation, it might be a good idear to cut out the middleman and save on those pool fees (and keep the transaction fees) while still being able to pay your bills regularly.

I've been oriented so far about the mining business of cryptocurrency. There has two categories of mining business which are:

1. Mining Solo and
2. Mining in Pool.

The first form is simply when a miner mines as an individual. He bear the cost of buying the equipment needed to mine.

The advantage of this form of mining is that the miner will keep all the reward to himself while the disadvantage is that it may take longer time to mine a block.

The second form of mining is when group of miners come together and mine together in order to obtained faster and better result.

The advantage of this is that the it takes shorter time to mine a block and the disadvantage is that the proceed or reward is shared among the participating miners which will make the payment smaller compared to the solo miner.

These are what I want us to discuss;

1. Based on your judgemwnt which of the option is a better option for mining ?

2. What are the requirement for a miner to join a mining pool?

I got some helpful information in relation to this thread on the below link:

https://www.coindesk.com/learn/bitcoin-101/how-bitcoin-mining-works