Questions about solo mining

I've been mining with around 50 30 series GPUs for about a year and a half, and I recently got my hands on some kaspa ASICs a couple of months back. Now I'm really interested in trying out solo mining for BTC (totally aware of the risks, by the way I had a pretty decent run solo mining Ethereum, hitting 7 blocks in roughly 3 months). I’ve got an S19k Pro showing up tomorrow, and I plan to just set it up for solo mining and let it run since my power costs are only 0.08 per kWh, which is pretty cheap. 1. Is there a website where I can check out which pools have found solo blocks? 2. What's the best difficulty setting for the S19k Pro? Or would it be smarter to leave it as is? 3. Where are ckpool servers located? I'm on the west coast of the USA. 4. Where can I check the latency/ping for pools? Thanks a ton in advance!

You are looking for a pool website that just solved a solo block to encourage your mining journey? I don't know how this will help because just because a solo mine was solved on a pool doesn't mean you will be lucky on the same pool, do not worry yourself, just find a popular bitcoin mining pool and connect your asic miner, since you have a long term goal you will be fine. I suggest you leave things at default settings and let the asic do its thing, you claimed you as ready to do this for long, how long are we talking about? Visit CKpool itself and pretend as if you want to connect your miner, you will be given different server location, USA and others should be present there. Every miners always want to be sure that they are on the fastest server I get it, you can use this to do your thing. https://stratu.ms/latency-check

To answer your questions: 1. The most common solo pools which I would recommend are kano.is and the solopool from CK. Here are some statistics about the blocks found for CK's solo pool: https://btc.com/stats/pool/Solo%20CK 2. With your S19k you should reach around 130 TH/s - I would recommend using the default port which is '3333' 3. Only thing that I found about the location of the server is this post. Hosted in Vint Hill, Virginia US 4. Easiest way on windows would be with cmd. Open cmd and type this prompt: You should get an output with ur latency. Keep in mind that you should use this command from the location of ur miner. Not sure right now if you are hosting it @ home.

I plan to run the s19k solo until it doesnt run anymore. I was just wantinnting to see what pools have solved solo blocks and how many, just to see the legitimacy of the pool actually paying out and to see the frequency of solo blocks over the entire network. Using:  https://check-host.net/check-ping?host=btc.viabtc.io:3333 Its showing ping is 18ms for the us servers, but viabtc show a ping of like 0.8 ms?

Like I mentioned before easiest way to check our latency to a specific server would be to use the cmd on Windows or terminal on Mac/Linux. This value is certainly more accurate than check-host.net which u were using. I tried it aswell and it used a different geolocation. The command is the same on all systems:

Alas you will find that ckpool only has a single server in one place in the usa, no others anywhere else, not even to do block distribution. So if you happen to be close to that one server, I guess that means lower stales, but you also have to hope that one block you find also gets out to the rest of the world fast ... Of course feel free to visit my pool with servers around the wold and the fastest block distribution