Hey fellow miners
I want to share some of my experiences, adventures, and thoughts from the past few weeks and months about solo mining. This should serve as both a guide and a review for those who are in similar situations and looking for answers or wanting to share their own stories. It’s not gonna be a detailed manual since that would be too much, but I'll touch on some points I think are important. Feel free to do your own research on the topics I cover, and if you have questions, don’t hesitate to start new threads about them. Just a heads up, everything I mention is based on my personal views, so it might not match the facts or what others think. Also, I'll only talk about Bitcoin here because altcoins and all that junk don't interest me.
1) What you need > hash power for SHA-256.
If you're going solo mining, guess what you need? Yep, hash power! You can either have your own gear like ASIC miners (like Bitmain Antminer, MicroBT Whatsminer, Canaan Avalonminer, etc.) or use USB miners made for the SHA256 algorithm (like Gekkoscience Compac F, NewPac, etc.). Or you can rent the needed hash power from popular platforms like MiningRigRentals.com or NiceHash.com. The idea behind these hash power markets is straightforward: ASIC miner owners can choose...
EDIT: important info:
I checked the solo mining pools presented in the second post for the Coinbase transaction they generate. For those who don't know what the coinbase transaction is --> this is the very first transaction within a block where the reward (of currently 6.25 BTC) plus the transaction fees are paid out to the lucky miner. The coinbase transaction can therefore be used to see the payout address(es) that the pool operator configured, so you can see where a payout would be made in the case of a successful mined block. Unfortunately some pools have turned out to be black sheeps, they are obviously SCAM. Please read carefully the warnings about the corresponding pools and avoid them! You wouldn't get a single Satoshi even in the case of a block hit, and you'd just be mad as hell.
Note: The payout amounts shown were snapshots when I read the coinbase transaction, which is why the total payout amount in the list differs from pool to pool. Since the number of transactions included in a block and differ from pool to pool, this results in different total payout amounts.
Comparison of solo mining pools with my subjective rating:
soloblocks.io (0.4%)
Pro:
Website clean and simple, with API function and freely selectable worker names. The pool operator has his own support thread here in the forum and also on Twitter. According to his own statement, he is not using a cheap VPS, but a dedicated baremetal server with dual-node failover, fast internet connection, NVMe disks and 32GB RAM. Since he is trying to get into the pool business as a newbie, some users have built up concerns about his pool and distrust. However, he goes out of his way to authentically address any questions and has taken the trouble to write a guide for a method that explains how to gain insight into his pool to gain trust. In doing so, he explains[/url] how to test your mining pool and verify that it really does what it is advertised to do. Anyone can verify through this method which payout address is used for withholding the pool fee and also the exact amount of the pool fee that is configured. All other known pool operators could take a leaf out of his book, he is the first to make this public in this form and offer it as a finished manual, I know of no other pool operator. He also makes no secret of the fact that he currently has no users / workers. The operator of this pool seems authentic and does not hide with excuses and any lies, at least so my subjective first impression. The test run with 100 TH/s worked well, the statistics were also displayed very promptly on the dashboard. Worker names are possible here. The biggest advantage is, of course, that here the smallest fee of only 0.4% is expressed. I think this pool has potential, I will continue to monitor him and if some day a block hit will occur on this pool and the payout is successful without problems, then I will also try it out.
Con:
He has only one server and therefore only one location (Europe). The pool only offers varDiff and fixed values for lowDiff/highDiff, customDiff is not possible. He had used misleading DNS names in the beginning, which should pretend another location. But after that was met with criticism in his support thread, he probably removed that. In his thread I had asked him why there was no display for "best share diff" and "best ever" and he contacted me privately and explained that this was a side project for him (but for such stuff he probably has time and desire) and what the difference between "best share" and "best ever" was. Questionable how to interpret that...hmm ? For a long time no update or answer came in his thread, only the other day when I asked him again he replied on it. His response however was less impressive, so I lost a bit of sympathy with this pool. He falls into self-pity and takes on the victim role, complaining that he does this in his spare time. I don't want to know what happens if someone ever finds a block, the payoff is hanging somewhere and he argues on such grounds. I hope that his attitude to this will change, time will tell ...
Coinbase transaction verification:
NOK --> The check fails, it seems like a json_rpc_call is not compatible with the miner (cgminer). Thus, my miner's decoding attempt to extract information about the built Coinbase transaction fails. This is a bad sign for me, which is why I have to change my following conclusion to negative afterwards.
Conclusion:
In his thread he tries strenuously to advertise his pool, but the response is still low. The soloblocks.io pool is quite new (only 5 months old) and according to that he certainly doesn't have it easy. It is a pity that there is no "best share" and "best ever" integrated in the statistics yet, hopefully this will come in the future. It would be just as good if he offered alternative servers. In the internet unfortunately you don't find any reports or other info to this pool, there are only two worker in use (presumably its own), this pool seems not be used at all. Since this pool has never found a block I will avoid it for now. If his pool ever finds a block and the user gets the reward without complaint and his pool gains a good reputation, I will consider soloblocks.io again.
EDIT: After the Coinbase verification failed, I cannot trust this pool and will avoid it. I will try have already tried to contact the pool operator and clarify this point. The pool operator jack3rror is already tinkering and I'm curious what will come out of it, I'll keep you posted.... Until the final clarification I mark this pool with an orange flag (orange flag) and should the problem be solved or clarified to the positive, I will adjust the info to this pool again.
zsolo.bid (0.5%) !!!CAUTION!!! Do not use !!!
Pro:
Clean and clear website. You can mine directly here via own Bitcoin address so no registration is required. Apparently, this pool has a total hashrate of 170 PH/s according to its own data, which is definitely something to be proud of if this is really true. So this could mean that many users mine here and trust the pool.
Con:
When sending hash power to this pool, it takes a really long time to even see info in the dashboard at some point. After 11min I got info displayed on the dashboard at all. This is very unusual and I haven't encountered it with any other pool so far. Also with this pool "best share" and "best ever" is not displayed. Since I'm a bit skeptical about the displayed total hashpower of ~170 PH/s I checked with the instructions of the pool operator soloblocks.io to see which string this zsolo.bid pool uses. It is the hex value 0a4d696e696e67636f7265 which corresponds to the text "miningcore". This term doesn't mean anything to me and I couldn't find any blocks containing this text in the BTC blocklist either. Please correct me if I am wrong with this. But if this would really be as shown here, then it also means that this pool has not found a single block in solo mining mode yet. Also no info here in the forum or in the net can be found about it. This again is in controversy with the displayed high total hashrate. So I personally evaluated this as zsolo.bid 'trying to trick around' with the indication of its user/total hashrate, so I list this point as a negative. But as I said, I'm happy to be proven right and am all ears in this regard.
coinbase transaction verification:
6.25051475999997 BTC will go to 1982Ehhado9a2znLevwTiaECDFXpNajT9N
NOK! !!!WARNING!!! --> The payout address belongs to the pool operator! If you would hit a block on this pool, then the full reward including the contained transaction fees goes to the mentioned payout address, the miner would receive nothing to his specified mining address. Since this address currently shows no balance, this can mean two things: either no single block has been found so far or the pool operator periodically changes the payout address after each block hit in his pool software to a new payout address, so that no refer
I'm not at all sure why you need to publicly post a list of all the current miner usernames on the pool and how that is on topic.
Certainly it would help bots and attackers - so I'd assume that's not your reason.
Please remove it.
The screenshots give an impression of which statistical data and functions are available and to what extent a pool is in demand and many users exist or not.
If you really care about sensitive data of your users (as you obviously deceptively propagate), I can highly recommend you to perform a pseudonimization of the data from the users who use your pool. Put them a mask on, not off. The screenshots shown here can be reproduced and extracted from the pages by anyone, so there is nothing to remove.
Though I will add it is amusing I got the biggest write up full of your personal opinion of me
P.S. yes KanoPool has found 2433 blocks since 2014.
The only difference between solo and pplns is accounting, i.e. who I send the reward to.
I added that accounting recently, but yeah you weren't around while I paid out 2433 blocks, hundreds of millions of dollars, over the years.
Edit: but my point is that you also said:
So yeah you are ignoring the 2433 blocks paid by the pool and making a ridiculous statement.
Correct. That's exactly what I wrote in the first thread:
Your pool has not yet found a block in "solo" mode and therefore the important note, one should not compare apples with oranges and to correctly interpret the place in the ranking.
Well you are comparing apples with apples.
The servers are the same for all mining, all the same work generation software, all the same that's found thousands of blocks that I've paid.
Heck I even paid out all the outstanding dust balances above 10000 sat last year.
The only differences now, is who KDB assigns who should get the reward.
This original reward management is in the public git for pplns, but I've simply added and tested an account type flag, pplns or solo, that decides who's balance is affected when a block is found.
Running the payout is the same as before also, but only one person will show up being owed.
Since I am the developer of all the software involved in this, even if it did screw up (which it wont), it's no issue to resolve either, it does not automatically send BTC anywhere, there is one manual step to simply tell it to generate the transaction, verify it and report what it is doing.
No doubt you'll add that having a manual step is a risk, but since most normal pools out there have had the opposite happen, where BTC was lost due to issues with their fully automatic payouts, and I never have lost any, I prefer that one manual step.
Thanks for sharing your point of view. That's why I said I personally don't like potential profit going to a "third" party first. I wouldn't want to watch my >6.25 BTC profit get transferred to you, and shortly after read the message here on the board or somewhere else on a newspaper that you had an accident and died or something else bad happened to you and thus I never get my coins because they are parked on your bitcoin address.
There is no need for a "middleman", there is no need for a "bank" in between, if it can be done in another way --> directly. And that is exactly what the Coinbase transaction allows. That's why I can't recommend anyone to mine at a pool that doesn't allow them to use their own Bitcoin address for a direct (via coinbase transaction) potential reward payout. Ultimately, each miner has the choice to decide what they prefer.
100% this. It has always been the issue, not just with solo pools but any pool that is run by just 1 person.
CAN something horrible happen to all the operators working @ ViaBTC / prohashing / wherever. Yes, of course. But, it's a lot less likely then it happening to a pool with just one person running it.
On the flip side of that, if something does go wrong @ kano.is we all know who to blame, so there is that, there would be nothing we could do about it but we would know who to blame. The other side is also, if something does go wrong with other larger pools they MIGHT be able to send the BTC out of their own pockets. Antpool may suck for several reasons, but if they do loose your funds they can replace them out of pocket. Will they is a different story.
-Dave
I did respond to your comment and explained why I don't recommend solo miners to mine on your pool. And I also underlined that everyone is free to form their own opinion and decide where they want to mine.
I said that to date no solo miner has mined a block on your pool
Feel free to air your personal differences with other pool operators in your threads, but not here, which will be deleted.
There is enough info out there for those interested to pick from.
Just wanted to thank the OP. This write-up was very helpful.
Thinking about renting some hashrate and wondering if there's any higher a likelihood of getting a block if I rent the more expensive SHA256 rigs, or should I rent SHA256AsicBoost rigs [cheaper overall]?
BTW I know the latest gen ASICs use AsicBoost (and my S19s do as well), but specifically when renting rigs for SOLO mining I'm wondering if there's any reason I'm missing to choose the pricier SHA256 rentals.
Nope.
1 submitted share = 1 attempt to find a block
For the same amount of BTC, if you rent cheaper, you will have more shares, so more chances to have your block.
Of course AsicBoost is the way to go, giving you more or less +10%
Indeed and if you use MRR you will pay a lot more for each submitted share, so dramatically reduce your chances of getting a block.
Some people insist on using MRR, probably coz they get some kick back.