What is Solo Mining?
Solo mining, or individual mining, refers to an individual trying to confirm a block on the blockchain alone. In other words, Solo mining is a way of mining cryptocurrencies without the participation of a mining pool.
Pool mining is a group of miners who come together as a single miner in the blockchain. In this way, miners can ensure stable mining income.
How does Solo mining work?
Solo mining is the earliest form of mining. Satoshi Nakamoto's vision is "one CPU, one vote". To vote, you must be an active miner on the blockchain, which means that every miner on the blockchain must run its own full node.
Because the block reward and block time usually do not change, but the number of miners in the network increases, the number of rewards available to each miner in a specified time interval also decreases.
For example: Bitcoin's block time is 10 minutes and the block reward is 6.25 BTC. If there is only one miner in the network, the miner can get a block containing 6.25BTC reward every 10 minutes. Now add another miner to the network (with the same computing power level as the previous one), then the miner can get a block containing 6.25BTC reward every 20 minutes (statistics). Now suppose there are 1 million miners in the network mining BTC. According to statistics, it may take 1 million blocks or 6944 days to get a block.
For solo miners, you must first create a full node and communicate directly with the blockchain. Mining pools do this. Mining pool operators set up a Bitcoin node (or any other cryptocurrency node) and act as a single miner in the network, but this miner will have an absurdly high total computing power, sometimes even more than 25% of the total computing power of the network. When controlling more than 51% of the total computing power of the network, it will pose a threat of 51% attack!
What is the difference between Solo mining and mining pool mining?
After a Solo miner has his own node, he can still use multiple mining machines to mine. For example, Jack has 10 mining machines. He creates his own node and then connects his 10 mining machines to his node. This is also a Solo mining and tries to find blocks on the blockchain.
If Jack decides to allow external miners to connect to his node for mining, then he becomes a mining pool and he must now distribute the revenue according to the number of computing power shares contributed by each miner.
In summary, we can conclude that Solo mining is very similar to pool mining. The main difference between the two is that in Solo mining, miners try to confirm blocks as individuals, which has a little gambling element in it, while in pool mining, miners gather together to work together to obtain stable and safe mining income. It should be noted that some mining pools with too little total computing power may not allow miners in the mining pool to obtain stable income.
The current block rewards for various currencies SOLO are as follows:
- Bitcoin: 10 minutes block time, 3.125 BTC block reward
- Litecoin: 2.5 minutes block time, 6.25 LTC and 10,000 doge block rewards
- KASPA: 1 second block time, 58.27 kaspa block rewards
- Ethereum Classic: 15 seconds block time, 2.048 ETC block rewards
- KDA: 1.9 seconds block time, 0.955 KDA block rewards
