Solo Mining vs Pool Mining

Yeah, my server at vultr is about 12 to 15ms away from me and its pretty cheap. I have been butting heads with the setup as my coding is limited and my .js is even more limited! would this be my own node that is a peer to other nodes? or would it be a private type master node all on its own?

Tried this, gave up, blockchain took too long, I’m not interested in that coin. Focusing on Litecoin and merge mining exclusively.

I don’t know what you mean by “master node.”

This would just be another node on the network.

Ive been thinking, what will increase if i build a small server as a node here on the premisses? I have a bunch of new intel nucs laying around, i might as well turn one of those into a node. I will try to get it setup to day. Also, do you have a tutorial on setting it up? I really appreciate your help and if we can get it going, i will send you a gift!

Those instructions should work for any machine that has Ubuntu installed

Week 7
Expected Time per Block = 97 days 2 hours
Pool Speed = 1.9 GH/s
Blocks found = 0

Got to figure out merge mining…

My hash rate on every pc like 200kH/s each pc - so 200x8 pc’s?

It’s possible but unlikely.

It would take a very long time. Unless you know your hashrate, we can’t give you an estimate.

Better off taking the money you’d be paying on electricty (and the money you’d be missing out by wasting your time) and buy some scratch-and-win lotto tickets.

Just finished reading up to this point and was hoping to see you found a block! Maybe you will today!

I’ve been reading about solo mining for the last couple of days. Everyone says forget it, but that’s making me want to do it even more! I have a A4+ and found this pool. It’s litecoin and Dogecoin solo mining.

http://ltc.tbdice.org/index.htm

URL
stratum+tcp://tbdice.org:13333
WORKER
Ltcaddress.workerid
PASSWORD diff_23592:Dogeaddress:email@someminer.com:type=51

I’m a little confused at how to set up this properly but glad to see you found a way to test. I don’t really care about the dogecoin. The difficulty is another issue I’m using this formula.

A4+
620mh / 1000 / 1.4 + 65536 = 29,023.08

The setup above is from a L3 which is similar. Any thoughts on setup? What difficulty should you use on pools?

Thanks

Don’t mine solo if you only have 1

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Isn’t there a better chance on a pool with solo mining ? The one I got on last night had 1653 workers. The hash rate of the pool is 906.136 Gh/s. I also pointed my S9 at another pool for BTC. I guess a few days won’t hurt!

Good luck!

Have you tried overclocking the A4+ yet ? If so what worked best?

Thanks

Not sure I understand this question, I don’t think either method has a better chance in theory.

I overclocked one of mine and it was at 720mh/s which was pretty sweet, stayed pretty chill too. I will probably overclock them all once the warranty expires.

What exact settings did you use on overclocking? I read to try frequency 1152MHz and then try adjusting VID between 22-14.

Week 8
Expected Time per Block = 97 days 2 hours
Pool Speed = 1.9 GH/s
Blocks found = 0

Mining on the Raspberry Pi
After messing around with this for a while, I’ve abandoned quit. Mucking with compiling all the coins I wanted to merge mine was a pain and the pi just can’t handle it. I still think bare-metal is the way to go, might pick up an old tower or splurge and build something custom.

Merge Mining
Figured out merge mining. I think what took the longest what just understanding how to deal with private keys, wallet import format keys, and public addresses. There isn’t much instruction on setting up for merge mining. (Days of google, reddit, bitcoin wiki, github exploring, pieced it together thanks that BS in CE)

I set up a small test to merge mine Litecoin and Dogecoin using the testnets. I was successfully able to merge mine with my addresses! Its all about the private key…

root@ip-172-31-3-39:/opt/stratum-server# /opt/litecoin-0.14.2/bin/litecoin-cli -datadir="/ltctest" getwalletinfo
{
  "walletversion": 130000,
  "balance": 250.00000000,
  "unconfirmed_balance": 0.00000000,
  "immature_balance": 150.00194494, <- MERGE MINED
  "txcount": 8,
  "keypoololdest": 1514666972,
  "keypoolsize": 100,
  "paytxfee": 0.00000000
}
root@ip-172-31-3-39:/opt/stratum-server# /opt/dogecoin-1.10.0/bin/dogecoin-cli -datadir="/dogetest" getwalletinfo
{
    "walletversion" : 60000,
    "balance" : 0.00000000,
    "unconfirmed_balance" : 0.00000000,
    "immature_balance" : 530011.00000000, <- MERGE MINED
    "txcount" : 53,
    "keypoololdest" : 1517010194,
    "keypoolsize" : 101
}

You can seem my merge mined LTC/Doge blocks:

Litecoin (Testnet): Litecoin Testnet (LTCTEST) Address n4cEha6DPSBsWzumoV6ENfeRjMkCJKzSWt — SoChain
Dogecoin (Testnet): Dogecoin Testnet (DOGETEST) Address ngbqGN9kzMDs5pxdWB6eE7SskxVcb2L4xE — SoChain

If only that was real coin…

I’ve documented my work here for others who are working on this: Solo Merge Mining Litecoin and Dogecoin

Still haven’t completed what I set out to setup. I want to merge mine all the coins that litecoinpool.org is merge mining. Will move this Litecoin/Dogecoin into production soon.

Future Work
I’ll be working on deploying my merge mining Litecoin and Dogecoin setup into production once I get some sleep. I’m also going to get in touch with some of my colleagues and share this setup so they can test it on their setup.

I’ll continue to work on AWS over GCP, planning on refactoring my tutorial to recommend AWS. I ran into some issues on GCP with logging over the weekend working with a new mining op and I realized, GCP is still not as good as AWS… I want to move to hardware, thinking about building a physical appliance for solo merge mining since I’ve seen some interest from larger miners (the types of miners with estimated block times of 2 days!).

Profit/Loss
I stopped doing the PnL calculations because I’m pretty sure I’m about even to where I’d be mining pool. That’s because, I’ve been contacted by a lot of miners about this and many have tipped me some LTC for my time. (Most I just recommend sticking to mining pool.)

Still have not found a block but whatever, you can’t buy this with money. Totally worth it. Will do the calculations once I find a block.

Hey bro great work and I really appreciate you going out on a limb and trying solo mining. You’re pretty much the only one that has documented it like this and we all think about solo mining when the pool reports we found a block much sooner than we should have. Mad respect for you. Pretty bummed out you didn’t hit a block tho…

You the real MVP

Thanks @CryptoColby

I’m still not really expecting to have found one yet based on my expected block time. I said I’d mine for two months but I’m just going to keep going because if I stop, it’ll be all for nothing.

I have a lot of confidence in the merge mining so hopefully that’ll help shorten the time between finding blocks.

If it’s possible, I suggest you to do both. Start your solo mining when you are a member of a mining pool. All the best.

I think you’re proposing I split my hashing power, some to pool, some to solo.

I’d rather commit all my hashing power to solo mining exclusively.

Just finished downloading the Viacoin blockchain and Myriadcoin blockchain.

Now I’m merge mining both in addition to Litecoin.

Waiting on the Dogecoin blockchain to finish downloading… it’s taking forever.

Looking into adding Pesetacoin, Canada Ecoin, Huntercoin, and Argentum to mirror what litecoinpool.org is merge mining. The problem with these coins is they need to be build from source code which is always a pain.

Week 9
Expected Time per Block = 114 days 20 hours
Pool Speed = 1.8 GH/s
Blocks found = 0

I’ve been merge mining Viacoin, Myraidcoin, Dogecoin, and Litecoin for about 1 week.

I haven’t found any blocks yet on any chain.

I have nothing new to report. I will try adding merge mining for Pesetacoin, Canada Ecoin, Huntercoin, and Argentum when I find some excess energy to devote to building these from source.

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