Topic: WHY DIDN'T I SOLO MINE!!! (Read 5257 times)

Difficulty increases as time marches on and we are fast approaching the time next year when the amount of bitcoins awarded will be half.  Here's the rub.  There are a fixed amount of blocks and that number decreases by one approximately every 10 minutes (much faster on Deepbit right now).  Every block gone permanently reduces the maximum amount of revenue you can make in Bitcoin.  Also new miners can pile in at any time to make the work you are doing harder if the network has to adjust in an extreme way.  Unless you have significant hashing power and can earn multiple blocks per days solo mining it makes more sense to participate in a pool and get a cut of every block.  As continuous  time spent increases your payout statistically should be what you would be making solo mining minus fees of 0-3% without difficulty risk.  Difficulty risk meaning that in reality your fastest worker in your private pool  contributing to your overall hash rate is way to slow to realistically find a block before the fastest workers in the network.  Slowest workers being CPU miners at around 20Mh/s and fastest being over 700Mh/s.

Bottom-line: For $20K you could build 20 machines to gross 4,345 BTC worth $60.8K@14BTC .  That's $40K in profit in year one if prices hold, but of course they can go up or down.  So mining is literally a business that runs itself and with significant hashing power that is maintained you can make it Ramen profitable running a shit load of machines.  You can boost profitability and get geometric gains when the market is volatile, but for the majority of Bitcoin's life it hasn't been.  The run up to $30 was something special as well as the volatility afterwards that day traders love.  I think for a while we will just be seeing a lot of sideways trends both bullish and bearish. 

In the end Bitcoin is just money.  Build something of value and sell it if you want to make money.  I think the pool providers are an excellent example.  They are selling longterm mining insurance for a 0-3% fee. In exchange I think Deepbit is easily pulling in over $200K/yr conservatively.  I don't think mining is worth it you can't afford a hashrate that expects several blocks a day. Most of the professional employed technical guys can make a lot more money just working.  Building out a 50 machine server farm to net $151K for example is a poor allocation of resources.  With that upfront allocation of resources you could build a business that accepts any form of payment and earn a ton more. 

For the record I'm a miner with about 2Gh/s.  I can't justify the throwing a ton of cash into miners vs buying a ton of Facebook stock when it IPOs.  Going long on mining at this stage is gambling.  I would be interested in a pool where membership requires a 2Gh/s minimum.  That could be really cool and ultra profitable. Like the ladders for Bticoin miners, LOL!!!  See you all in NYC for the conference!

-btcbaby 

Btw, iam mining for about 1,5 month at deepbit at 1,3ghash and ive never found one single block.

I can not into variance.  Halp.

I am really confused. I always thought mining in a pool means all the participants are sharing their computing power towards finding a common block and that the pool server will send out to each worker a "piece of the puzzle" to solve & and solo mining you have to solve everything yourself. Is it correct to assume if you found a block in a pool over a certain period of time that you would also find a block by solo mining? I have 3.2g/hash in a pool right now for about 2 weeks and have only found 1 block according to the pool stats.

Very simple, create a bitcoin.conf, start the bitcoin program in "Server mode" (add -server) to the command line, and point miners at localhost.  Google for the specifics.

Solo mining from day 1 and I think it's worth it.

In pooled mining there is no good luck, just annuity.  In solo mining you MIGHT get lucky in the short term (I have) and will get paid fairly in the long run.

been mining for a month and some, haven't found a block. I guess the pool is doing its job

I found 3 blocks on slush's pool. I got angry about that, went solo right away, and 8 hours later, boom, i found a block. 11 days later another one. With just a SINGLE 5850 doing 275mhash/s back then.

i guess no-one read this :S
and i found a block on slushes om my single 5770 @ 200HMhash, i now have nearly 4Ghash and "found" my second block 3 months later

Are you people serious? That's like "I chose the wrong lottery ticket". It's probability, luck, chance, fate, whatever. Your solo performance has absolutely nothing to do with your pool record.

i should have solo mined also.  It appears that I would have gotten 3x more bitcoins mining solo than mining in the pool according to my stats on deepbit and BtcGuild.

Near the bottom of here: https://deepbit.net/settings

where on deepbit web site can I find the number of blocks found by you?

EDIT: Found it.

Well I've found a few blocks on deepbit, how about that. I made tycho some good bux

I'm not bummed though, I'm still doing statistically about as well as would be expected otherwise.

probability is hard

Whatever I still am lucky a friend has only solved 1 and I have solved 7 and he has 4.1 ghash while I have 1/4 of that and hes been mining for about the same I guess I just got lucky I guess...

You wouldn't have generated those 7 blocks if you were mining solo.  Part of the header that you are encrypting is the merkle root, which would have been completely different if you were solo, because the 50 block reward would have been to your address.  To put it simply, you can't use your "luck" in the pool to estimate your "luck" running solo

probably an error in their code

So today I looked on my deepbit account and see this

"Number of blocks found by you: 7"

I Only have 1.6 ghash and this? I have been mining with deepbit for like 1 and a half months and then i see that omg my luck D: