Is this BTC mining advice worth following?

A buddy of mine told me to steer clear of running my own BTC node. He shared a horror story from when he thought he could outsmart the system, but in the end, he said solo mining with pools is the way to go... Is there any truth to that? Also, what's the best ASIC miner for solo mining Bitcoin? My electricity bill is skyrocketing, and I've got no rush to stack some BTC.

Solo mining to pools that have a low fee is better then running your own node and dealing with all the other things needed to do it, like setting up a stratum / pool server and everything else. As for solo mining in general, there are arguments for solo vs PPLNS vs PPS mining. Each has different benefits and costs. Solo tends to have the best fees BUT it can take years to find a block depending on the speed of your miners all the while you are making no BTC PPS has the highest fees but you get paid consistently even if the pool has an unlucky time and finds no blocks. PPLNS (and it's variants) on LARGE pools is the best compromise. Usually lower fees then straight PPS, and so long as the pool is large enough consistent payments. You can use a site like https://www.asicminervalue.com/ to figure out about how much you will generate with each miner. Don't forget to keep in mind difficulty increases, and everything else that may change. -Dave

I heard Caanan and Bitmain are good providers. Pretty sure some miners also post reviews or questions on this sub-board so you can take your time browsing here. Buying the miner is probably gonna take some time, with delivery being a problem for some people. Make sure you double-check the seller if you're not buying directly from the provider.

The thing is you can decide to go ahead with the lesson that your friend has shared with you about his experience, or if you doubt your friend and sense that he is just trying to discourage you out of selfish interest, thinking that if it is not so profitable, why are people still trying to run their own btc nodes?, you may still want to find out on your own, but that may not be the wise thing to do. The experience may end your mining career.

I think your friend experience the same thing happening to me in installing and having full node and setting it up to mine solo. It's very stressful on the first time you set up the full node in the end your hard drive is full you didn't't think that the full nodes need to download the whole block chain to be fully functional and to mine solo. So in the end setting up your miner directly to the pool is much easier than having your own node. I guess your friend only mine for lottery so the best miner for solo mining currently is Compact F USB stick miner or for a little bit faster Futurebit Apollo take note of this one it has built-in full node.

how did he justify this to you? what was the reason? i would prefer the solopool for convenience, because i don't want to buy extra hardware to run a full node.

Indeed, for solo mining in the pool there is no need to launch a full node, you can simply and easily set up a miner for solo mining, for example on solo.ckpool.org