So what is the likelihood that with difficulty over 9000 that I can mine a block with 27MH?
Time required to mine block is the same for solo or pooled mining. Decision about going solo or pool should be based on nothing but
your affinity for gambling, as follows:
1. Go pool > you will get Z coins in Y amount of time.
2. Go solo > you will get X coins in Y amount of time, where X is anywhere in range from 0 to multiple times Z. That's gambling part.
Note that with infinite amount of time, one will
surely get more coins if mining solo = it's because pools have fees.
I'm still solo mining and sometimes switch to load-balanced mode. When soloing, main "pool" is Terracoin server and Coinotron is set
as failover, which is useful because sometimes Terracoin server fails for a few seconds. When that happens, miner auto-switches to
Coinotron, so no time is wasted. As soon as Terracoin server becomes available, miner auto-switches to solo.
I have always wondered on solo mining.... and with a low hash rate compared to the network... it can take a while to submit a hash or successful share... and it is from that share that could then solve a block.... once a block is found... everyone gets the update on the blockchain and the miners then use this to identify a new block is attempting to be found.
What happens if your miner is still trying to solve the previous block that has only just been discovered? or is it that it gets the info immediately from the blockchain and will start to solve the next? If this is the case then I take it that would take care of the difficulty adjustment ... if not then how does your miner know to stop trying to solve hashes on the last block and start on the next?