I’ve been mining at litecoinpool.org and my stats show I’ve found 2 blocks. The payout I’ve gotten from the pool is lower than the 50 LTC reward I would have gotten had I found those 2 block solo moning. My question is, should I be mining solo?
Also, is UNOMP what I need to look into to mine solo?
Thats how it works, you can be very lucky, go solo and keep finding blocks, but it can be the other way around
I think you need a full node to solo mine. (sry, I have been out of the mining scene for too long)
Thanks @pguerrerox, figure it’s just luck. Guess I could go solo and keep by fingers crossed I’ll find another two blocks so quickly.
As far as the full node, it looks like that’s what I need to do, I have A4s from Innosilicon so I’m not sure if I can just SSH into them and configure something to mine solo. I suspect I need to set up a server, run litecoind, and do some other things then configure the A4s to connect to that server? I’m going to try UNOMP since that’s really all I can find. The README says its deprecated which is a little concerning to me, but if it works, it works I guess.
I ended up working on this today, after thinking more about how I want to participate in Litecoin, I realized beyond wanting the full reward, I just want contribute by maintaining my own node.
I put together a tutorial on how I setup my own node and mining pool for my machines here: Solo Mining Litecoin
I hope some people find this useful. Let me know what you think about the tutorial.
interested to know how it works out for you solo mining
I’ll keep you in the loop @PissMeOff. Definitely going to post here when I find my first block. Hopefully, that happens in the next 30 days…
So far things seem to be working out. The risk/reward is interesting to think about, expected value and what not. Looks like at my hashrate I have a 20% probability of finding a block in a month (according to Mining Calculator | litecoinpool.org). Though when mining at litecoinpool.org, I found 2 blocks in 3 months hashing at 1/3 the rate I’m hashing at now.
Those stats above are over the course of 3 months. (First 15 days my hash rate was in the 10s of MHs though.)
I’ve been running my Litecoin node and statum server for a few hours now and it all looks good from the logs, obviously haven’t found a block (yet) so best I can do is check the logs which I have setup to go to StackDriver in Google Cloud Platform. (I’m really just using Litecoin mining as an excuse to nerd out with technology, “a hobby that pays.”)
So the logs look good to me, maybe someone else can weigh in on this “share data”:
{
"job":"fe",
"ip":"REDACTED",
"port":REDACTED,
"worker":"REDACTED",
"height":1324033,
"blockReward":2509586617,
"difficulty":8192,
"shareDiff":"142277.86677726",
"blockDiff":98489231438.12776,
"blockDiffActual":1502826.407442135,
"coinbaseBuffer":[1,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,255,255,255,255,76,3,1,52,20,4,180,77,35,90,8,250,190,109,109,0,0,0,0,3,30,211,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,80,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,64,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,16,0,0,0,83,1,0,0,13,47,110,111,100,101,83,116,114,97,116,117,109,47,0,0,0,0,1,185,64,149,149,0,0,0,0,25,118,169,20,144,156,133,148,149,123,97,69,130,17,203,234,178,183,137,211,135,201,241,57,136,172,0,0,0,0],
"txHash":"96ad202cd1f865b4424830fe4a483233be5aa0dea86ce23706abfcbca4bd889f",
"headerHash":[9,18,16,5,244,27,32,248,160,21,23,96,51,227,67,167,183,5,82,172,167,180,60,14,169,183,234,117,0,0,0,0],
"blockBigNum":{},
"blockHashInvalid":"decd2f2e3f38816e7507dc50dbb85286b575e560cd483a74b00862a010822cce"
}
My plan is to let it run for two months, if I don’t find a block by then, back to pool mining. Fingers crossed.
I’m just stuck on how I can confirm its working, I don’t think I’ll really trust it until I find my first block… right now it feels very unrewarding. I kind of miss seeing the “Unpaid Rewards” number tick upwards on litecoinpool.org.
Good luck!
Day 2
I still have this feeling that it’s not working so I’ve been checking the logs a lot. I put together a console for myself and set up so alerts to make sure shares and invalid shares don’t fall/rise unexpectedly. Still no blocks found. I have an alert set up for that too. (That isn’t stopping me from checking my wallet a lot though.)
I’m wondering if I should be mining at a higher difficulty. Currently set to 8192 my workers hash at 650 Mhs, 230Mhs, and 130Mhs. The difficulty is set at the pool so each workers is getting the same difficulty. (I couldn’t figure out vardiff.)
Week 1
Still no blocks found, staring at the calculator seeing that I’m missing out on 1.3 LTC last week in favor of “playing the lottery” at 25% chance of finding a block each month. Anyone besides me think that this will be worth it?
There were some bumps.
First, I looked into merge mining Dogecoin. Could not figure that out for the life of me. Spent many nights up late trying to research how to do it. The hang-up is that the stratum server software I’m using only lets you put in one wallet address so unless I figure out an address that works for both DOGE and LTC, it looks like I’m stuck. LTC tip available for anyone who can help me get merge mining DOGE coin figured out.
Second, my more powerful machine seems to stop sharing and does not fail over to another pool. I have Stackdriver logging setup to watch share activity and I get an email when this happens.
You can see it’s happened a few times and depending on where I am, my time to resolution has varied. A simple reboot of the miner solves the issue. Not sure why it just stops sharing but doesn’t fail over?
I’ve adjusted the difficulty for the more powerful machine from 8192 to 16384 because I suspect that it’s the fact that it is submitting so machine shares per minute over the network that’s messing it up. We will see.
Thanks, everyone who has contacted me about my tutorial on Github, please star my repo if you found it helpful or informative.
Good luck, once you hit that block… You will know it’s worth.
What miners do you have?
Agreed, the 25LTC reward will make it all worth it. When I was mining as part of a pool, it took me like 45 days to find a block which is lucky. I won’t worry too much until I go 2 months without a block, then I’ll start to rethink this strategy. Or, I won’t and I’ll just keep playing the lottery.
I have Innoslicon A4 series miners, both the Dominator and the LTC Master.
I also have two Gridseeds which were my mining training wheels. I don’t run them now, probably going to gift them to a friend this holiday.
Week 2
Still no blocks, so far I’ve missed out on about 2.5 LTC… starting to add up. The prospect of a full 25 LTC reward still seems worth it.
Still having issues with where my machine stops submitting shares. I helped someone else setup a pool with 8 L3+ Antminers and they’re not having this issue. I moved from Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and I’m still having this problem. Since it’s only an issue for me using my rigs, I’m convinced its an issue with my rig, not with the Stratum Server setup. Still looking into it more, really a big issue I need to figure out because it’s causing a lot of downtime… Thinking maybe I need to up the difficulty since my machine hashes around 700MH/s.
Moving to AWS was a good idea because CloudWatch on AWS is way better than StackDriver on GCP.
Recently, I sold my A4 Dominator and given the recent surge in LTC, I thought it was a good time to invest in more machines so I’ve got 3 Innosilicon A4+ LTCMasters on the way which should bring my hashrate closer to 2.5GH/s. (Hopefully 2.8GH/s since the A4+ I have right now really hashes closer to 700MH/s.)
What I also find crazy is just how fast the difficulty has jumped. On a daily basis, my A4+ (620MH/s) would earn about 0.1 LTC (Mining Calculator | litecoinpool.org) which was how much my A4 (250MH/s) was earning in early November. On a USD basis though, earnings have pretty much stayed the same thanks to the recent LTC 
run up.
Thanks, everyone who has contacted me about my tutorial on Github, please star my repo if you found it helpful or informative.
waaaa,
I am following this post, hoping to see you mine that first BLOCK!
I have a question, where do you buy your mining rigs… all the places I have seen around they all look like a scam…
@pguerrerox, thanks! Good to know someone else is out there hoping for the I get lucky.
Straight from the manufacturer or eBay.
I am also SUPER interested in the outcome of this!! I was just wondering is it possible to set up the stratum server on an old computer and connect it to your home network? what was the reason or advantage of the cloud machine? thnx! and good luck
I am still eagerly waiting to find a block. At this point, I’d recommend sticking to pool mining.
Yes
I find it easier to work with.
Week 3:
Expected Time per Block = 242 days 11 hours
Pool Speed = 700 MH/s
I am still eagerly awaiting a block. I’ve helped a few other people get setup and we’re all waiting for blocks too. I’m hoping that one of us finds one soon just so I can get some confirmation this isn’t just a waste of time.
I get tempted to stop trying to mine solo and just go back to pool mining all the time. (For anyone reading this, I recommend sticking to pool mining at the moment.)
I spent the last week digging into the concept of share difficulty and eventually settled on bumping the share difficulty I was using up significantly.
I read in a few places that pool operators target a share difficulty of 4 - 20 shares/minute. I opted to go with a difficulty of 131072 which gave me between 4 and 10 shares per minute.
I hear that the share difficulty has no impact on the earnings however, I also hear that setting a higher share difficulty puts more of the work on your miner.
From what I understand (and someone please correct me because I’m not finding a lot online about this), the share difficulty I set for the worker acts as a filter. It tells the worker to only submit a share if it’s difficulty is greater than or equal to the share difficulty I set. So the worker spends more time hashing in order to find a hash that meets or exceeds the share difficulty.
The other configuration I looked into was maxconnections on the Litecoin Daemon. This is just a number to limit the peers that my Litecoin Node will connect to. I left this out at first and noticed my instance was sucking up a lot of bandwidth and I had about 90 connections or so. Seemed like too many so I dialed that down, setting maxconnections=20 in the litecoin.conf file.
Lastly, I’m considering switching my stratum server software to Node Open Mining Portal by zone117x, the original creator of the software I’m using now. Seems like that project is more maintained and comes with a front-end which might be interesting. Maybe after I find my first block I’ll switch it up.
Right now I just use CloudWatch as my view into the performance of the system.
have you considered opening your pool to the public? pools can be a great source of passive income. for instance I believe a lot of ppl may also want to hook up a device to solo mine with, you could set the pool up to payout the full block reward to the miner who solved it, and just chage a fee of 1-2% on moving funds from the pool wallet. I did a ton of research back in 2013 into open source stratum mining software and the database for registering users and setting up wallets, unfortunately a lot of what I learned at the time has already been improved upon and updated…
anyway keep up the updates!! still hella interested in this thread
just to clarify… I believe antpool or zoomhash are the only places you can find solo mining pools like this and I for one don’t trust either of these companies at all, which was why I asked.
I’ve looked into it. I don’t think it’s actually worth the energy, there are already many pools.
It’s hard to figure out how to adapt the software to mine to each miners address and not to the pool’s address (a hardcoded address).
But now you got me thinking about it for sure. @kmkfan628, how much hash power would you point to a pool like that?
I used to point my older equipment to a solo pool op that nicehash ran (something like solo.nicehash.com). Now I just point them to my own pool.
If you need your own pool and want to run your own node, I can help you out though. Look into this: Node Open Mining Pool. I plan on switching my underlying software this weekend to use that codebase instead of the version I used from UNOMP. I’ll update my tutorial on github when I do the cutover but it’ll be very similar to what’s there now.
In the long run, I think going solo will be a better option because of the transaction fees. Most pools don’t pay out the fees that are given as a reward as far as I am aware, hard to find anything on the internet about what pool operators do with the fees.
