Pooling versus solo mining | Bitcointalksearch.org

jrklein

newbie

Activity: 3

Merit: 0

P2Pool.

It provides the network and miner security of solo mining with the reward sharing of pooled mining.

I noticed that P2Pool also gives 0.5% of the reward to the miner that found the block and then divides the remaining 99.5% of the reward among the rest of the miners that participated.

Is this higher reward to the miner that solved the block common among pools or is this unique to P2Pool?

TooDumbForBitcoin

legendary

Activity: 1638

Merit: 1001

Quote

I've got 4 BE's on solopool right now. I'm trying not to look at it.

That's $200 annually in a pool on a static 5P network mining $1000 BTC.

Solo, that's one block every 5 million blocks, or every 95 years.

So I guess it's a question of life expentancy. Do you smoke? Exercise regularly?

There's a pool joke in there somewhere, but I can't find it.

gmaxwell

staff

Activity: 4284

Merit: 8808

The expected return— that is the average over all possible futures— is the same for either (ignoring any outages, pool fees, pool stales, any differential risk of theft/hacks at pools/locally). The variance of returns is what differs. If you're not depending on every cent of mining income for anything in particular you might prefer a higher variance option over fees and pool related risks. If you're the sort of person who likes to gamble then solo mining should be unusually attractive because the odds are in your favor (assuming you're mining at a profit even in the pooled case).

There are things in between just pooled and solo. E.g. with p2pool you can turn your share difficulty up fairly high.

os2sam

legendary

Activity: 3583

Merit: 1094