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Don't bother trying to get lucky on the 50BTC block bounty; join a pool that splits the winnings. Pools provide well over half the calculation capacity of the B
by bonzoesc 16y ago
Don't bother trying to get lucky on the 50BTC block bounty; join a pool that splits the winnings. Pools provide well over half the calculation capacity of the Bitcoin system, most are free to join and ones worth joining don't have any real requirements.
I make about 1 BTC per day just with spare GPU cycles on my desktop; it's not a substantial amount by any means, just a test pool for experiments and playing with software.
- joeyh 16y agoAFAICS, the benefit to being in a mining pool is you can make some bitcoins immediately, rather than waiting for a big, rare payout. There's no increased probability of winning due to pooling resources is there?
- JeremyBanks 16y agoYour expected gain is the same, but it has a smaller margin of error.
- shazow 16y agoThere is a small increase in probability because the pool is aware of the participants and thus reduces redundant work done by each participant. It becomes a slightly-less-than-random brute force operation. If you mine on your own, then your targets are effectively random.
- mike_esspe 16y agoThere is an increase of about 1% if the pool uses long polling. Pools are more well connected and notify your client, when block changes (without this you can work on an old block for some time before you get notification from the network). Though this increase is eaten by pool fees :)
- pnathan 16y agoWhat pool do you recommend?