Good luck!
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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.
Day 24
Expected Time per Block = 253 days 11 hours
Pool Speed = 700 MH/s
I caved today and said “■■■■ this, I’m going to join the mining pool for a daily payout.”
Did that for like 3.5 hours and got a small payout (was very close to the threshold I set for a payout on litecoinpool.org)
I reflected on it for a little, is it better to go with the pool and get a steady payout or continue going solo and hope I get lucky?
I came back to it after @kmkfan628 commented on this thread and realized I should just keep going if for no other reason then to document how it goes and provide updates.
I’d still recommend that people stick to mining in a pool but there’s a good argument to be made to mine solo. Really it’s about the fees. Right now, I look at the fees on the Bitcoin blocks (Bitcoin Block Explorer | BlockCypher) and sometimes the fees are more that 50% of the 12.5 BTC reward. On the Litecoin blocks, the fees average around 0.33 LTC (simple moving average I calculated from the last 5 blocks) and can be as high as 1 LTC.
If you think about it, as a miner you’re really providing the same service that was previously provided by banks: processing transactions. In the long run, whether I mine solo or as part of a pool, the work that I do will be compensated by the network. I’m banking on the fact that going solo will be a more profitable pursuit because there is no middleman between the work I do for the network and the network itself. (Though at the rate I’m going I won’t see that compensation for a while.)
I think at almost a year as the estimated time to find a block, this is all still a bit farfetched, it all sounds nice in theory. Mine solo and you’ll make more, yeah right. Just got to have trust in the network.
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Hey @nehgekim thanks for taking one for the team! 
I am new to LTC and a couple of my family members and I chipped in for an AntMiner L3+.
We are under the same impression that if we are going to do this, we are gonna go all in and solo mine.
When you are running your server on GCP (AWS now) do you have to pay a fee for that?
Other than the A4’s, what other hosts or servers are you using to host your solo mine server?
Thanks!
-Rob
I just run a single instance on AWS (t2.small). I’m actually planning on getting a machine so I own the hardware (trust no one) but still looking at the power it’ll use and factoring in a small % of my internet bill and it’ll pretty much end up costing the same.
GCP was nice because they give you $350 for 1-year which would cover all your costs for a year. I just think Stackdriver is a crappy log monitoring tool and I’m not interested in messing to much with logging applications. (Kibana’s not so bad though if anyone’s looking for logging applications.)
To be honest, if I had just 1 L3+ and went in on it with some family members, I’d join a pool so you start getting a steady return. My concern is just that the difficulty is going to rise so fast that your est. time to a block is going to double in another month and you may never ever find a block. That’s the risk you take. I’m bringing more machines online to mitigate that risk. (Forcasting that I need to double my hashing power every 6 months to keep up.)
Learn from my mistake. I totally regret not mining in a pool for the first month I had my A4+ since I could have easily mined enough to cover a significant part of my initial investment (in USD) since the price spiked. Now that the difficulty also spiked, I missed a critical window. I think a lot of L3+ and A4+ units will come online Jan, Feb and March so I think you want to try to get as much LTC as you can now so you and your group get some ROI (celebrate and consider reinvesting). If I were you I’d mine pool and watch to see how my experiment goes here first. Go solo once you are past 1 GH/s.
I appreciate your input!
I think we will take your advice. I setup an account on litecoinpool.org and we will just start mining there, atleast to get out investment back. Maybe then we will get another L3+ or A4+ (which should push us in the 1GH/s mark) and solo mine.
It’s all very exciting and can sometimes be overwhelming, so it’s good to talk it out and think about it clearly 
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This is one of the best readings in all of litecoin mining I’ve ever had. Thank you.
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Well am glad it’s helpful to the community. Kind of makes up for the LTC that I’ve missed out on by not joining a pool. Thanks for the comment @Romeococo