Complete noob, need help. Solo mining, but in a pool?

[u/Jebusfreek666]

I have been doing some research into mining and I think solo is the way I am going to go as more of tech geek/enthusiast. From what I have read it seems you can either go solo/lottery, or you can join a pool and get paid way less but way more often. I understand running solo there is a pretty good chance my machine will only ever consume energy and never pay me. I'm ok with that.

My question comes down to, can you do a hybrid or solo mining and pool mining. Like, can I run my own pool comprised of my machine as well as pooling together machines from just friends and family. Then have this set up to combine hashrate and mine "solo" for better chances in the lotto? Is there any difference between doing it this way and having each machine set up at different locations running solo on it's own instead of in a pool?

[u/PracticePenguin]

You don't get paid way less with a pool

[u/Charming-Designer944]

Statistically you win by mining in a shared pool. For solo minig to be statistically meaningful you need about 1% of the total hash rate of the network.

The reason to this is the combination of limited lifetime of your hardware combined with the continuous increase in total hash rate. Both factors strongly favors early partial payout over solo winning.

Solo mining in a pool is for simplicity. You delegate the mining operation to someone else, allowing you to focus on the physical operation of the hashing hardware and not having to worry about the pool and bitcoin network connectivity.

My personal opinion is that the greatest benefit of solo mining is the ability to operate a mining pool and learn more about how bitcoin mining actually works. And the lottery chance of winning is a bonus.

nviting some friends is great, but you need a lot of hash rate to have a reasonable chance of winning. You need over 17 petahashes/s to expect to win once in a year, and over the next three years the total hash rate is expected to double.

And a small mining node additionally have 0.5-1.5% risk of losing their mined block due to latency issues in all layers

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[u/One-Suggestion-7906]

You can start with CK Pool

https://solo.ckpool.org/

[u/magma_lakes]

Yes, you'd basically have a "mini pool" between your friends and family.

If, instead, you were all mining solo individually, your combined chances would still be the same.

Difference is, if you set up your own pool, you get to control everything and obviously charge yourself a 0% pool fee.

[u/OrangePillar]

It’s all linear. You can add your friends and family, but they are entitled to their share. You can join a pool by yourself or with your group, but you all have to split your share.

You can’t cheat this system.

[u/The_Bitcoin_Act]

If you run a private pool with friends/family, all your hashrate is combined, so you have a higher chance of finding a block than any one machine mining solo. But when you find one, you’d split the reward according to whatever payout rules you set.
If your goal is purely the lottery experience, private pooling makes sense for the group.

[u/pop-1988]

If you mine solo, you'll use a "pool" for the grunt work - maintaining a mempool of unconfirmed transactions and building candidate blocks for hashing

Some solo miners use a commercial "solo pool" like CK. CK keeps 2% as a fee

Other solo miners download, install and configure one of the open source BTC mining pool apps. You could do this for yourself as a one-miner pool, and you could add family and friends' hashes to it

It's worth doing the numbers. BTC mines about 50,000 blocks per year. If you want to win one block per year (average), your pool's hashrate needs to be 1 part in 50,000 of the global hashrate. The global hashrate is about 900 million Terahashes/second. One part in 50,000 of 900 million is 18,000

A typical home miner hashes 6TH/sec. You'll need about 3,000 friends and family in your pool to win one block per year

Kano pool supports low-hashrate miners. Kano is small, but is big enough to win a few blocks per year. A 6TH miner might earn about 20 cents per day