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.