Comparison of Mining Difficulty: Then and Now

What was the Bitcoin mining difficulty when you first got into mining? I can’t forget how back in 2013 the difficulty was just 15 million, which felt crazy at the time. Fast forward to today, and on January 7th it’s sitting at 24.2 trillion. Has anyone managed to hit any blocks recently, or is everyone just mining in pools these days?

is it all pool mining now  ,my friend

Oh? There are 2 folks that were running Solo who each hit a block in the past 3 days that will strongly disagree with your statement. Granted it is highly unlikely there will be a repeat of that anytime soon but nonetheless it is all just a matter of Luck. Also do not forget that regardless how massive a pool is, it is still just 1 miner in the pool that finds a block. It could be a faily low 2-3 THs or it could be a TOL 110THs miner but it still just 1 piece of hardware.

Wrong area of the Forum to discuss that.  Use the General or Altcoin areas. This area is for Bitcoin Mining using hardware only. Back to the topic, the 1st block I was paid for at Kano pool was on 2014-Oct-26 21:15 with a Diff of 35,985,640,265.08 . At the time I was running 574.09GHs. To-date I've found 10 for the pool

It's more like a single asic chip to make it even "worse ", a single S9 chip that hashes at 0.07th hits a block that is worth a quarter of a million $, isn't that crazy? it's probably all pool mining, even the ones that mine solo use a pool to solo mine anyways, there could be a few guys who maintain their node and mine against it, but you can probably count those on the fingers of a few hands.

to mine solo realistically (ie a block a day) takes 2eh 2eh is 20000 s19's!   2000 s19's = 200,000th or 200ph     200 s19's =   20,000th or  20ph       20 s19's =     2,000th or   2ph so at 8500 a unit 170,000,000.   170 million in gear and 70,000 kwatts an hour  or 70 megawatts an hour. so at 4 cent power it is  2800 an hour which is 67,200 a day in power to hit about 1.2 blocks a day and you laid out 170 million in gear so 1.2 x 6.3 = 7.56 coins a day 332,640 comes in and you burn 67,200 = 265,440 daily  profit  or 96.8 million a year and that means your did not pay off the s19's n a year. with fee free mining

I hope nobody in their right mind is making business plans on income from solo mining with anything below that or at least half of it, I wouldn't do such a thing, heck many of us don't want to handle luck variance on small/cheaper pools, let alone solo mine with a few PHs. I only point 1-2 S9s to Cksolo, sometimes (more likey rarely) and for fun I point a few hundred THs to the solo pool for a few hours and that's all about it, the rest are all on PPS+ pools.