Quote from: portosTCM on March 21, 2013, 07:32:45 PM

Hi.
My friends and I have couple strong PC's running on Win7 OS. I want to connect our rigs using poolserver. Power of our computers should be enough to 'solo' mining so we don't want to join to big poolserver but make a own one. We don't need to share income. We want to have one wallet for btc's and use it in common bussiness.

1. Is this possible that one computer has this wallet running and rest of computers has only miner-role?

2. Which poolserver application fits best for our expectations? (i prefer poolserverj beceause it works on windows)

3. How to configure poolserver to keep income in one wallet?

4. How to configure miners to work in web like this? (i prefer cgminer or guiminer)

5. What are requirements for network bandwith? Home network can handle it or we have to loan vps? (aproximately 15-20 of computers)

1. Mining and having a wallet are completely separate so... yes.

2. Just use bitcoind. You have proven you don't need a poolserver with this statement:
"We don't need to share income. We want to have one wallet for btc's and use it in common bussiness."
So run bitcoind, forward the ports and connect.

A reason for the poolserver though might be for stats. I have no experience with any pool servers besides p2pool nodes, so I can't help there.

3. As I said, mine to bitcoind and it will all go into one wallet.

4. Just like you configure them now. You can set the password and username in the bitcoin.conf file. You can use dyndns or no-ip or another dynamic ip service to point to the pool.

5. Certainly not very high. P2pool seems a bit demanding and I haven't gone over 30KB/s in spikes. This is with two friends mining (1.5-2GH/s total) and up to 25 total connected peers. (I might cap my peers to 5 and 5 soon though due to bandwidth caps).
So that is P2Pool and I only tell you about that because I am unsure of bitcoind but I know it would be less.

I am going to put this in bold in case you didn't actually look into the requirements for solo mining:
At the current difficulty, you will need 240GH/s to average mining one block per day. If you do not have this, solo mining is not plausible.
In less than 2 weeks, this requirement will increase to 320GH/s

So by "strong PCs" I hope you mean quadfire 7970s and by "a couple friends" I hope you mean 30+
--> This would average you 2 blocks per week until 3 days from now... then with the difficulty change, it would be more like 1-2 per week

If you mean what I think you mean and that you have 3 friends where one has a 7970, one has a 6970, one has crossfire 6870s and you have maybe crossfire 7970s, you could go your entire lives without finding a block solo. Because that would total ~2.6GH/s and it would take an average of 3 months to find a block. And this doesn't take into account the fact that every 2 weeks, the difficulty changes, further making the average time longer and longer. That fact alone makes it extremely unlikely you will ever find one.

Quote from: IntrepidMiner on March 21, 2013, 09:19:05 PM

Instead, I would recommend setting up a P2pool node (just a computer running bitcoin and p2pool) and pointing all your miners towards it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=18313.0

I personally like this idea and as I have mentioned above, it is what I do. The disadvantage of P2Pool is the same as solo mining, just reduced. This is only because P2Pool is currently only 300-400GH/s strong. Which introduces a lot of variance. For example:
A bit over a week ago, we went a whole couple days without finding a block.
The past few days have been very plentiful. I have made a lot of coin.

The other disadvantage is the payout system. It uses PPLNS. If you mine on and off, your payouts will be smaller than "normal" pools. You cannot get a real view of your profits until you mine non-stop for at least 24-hours and then wait for the next block. I've been getting about 0.06BTC/ block found.

Therefore, before suggesting joining my pool I did two thing:
1. Asked my friends if they intended to mine at or close to 24-7.
2. Had them set up a backup pool on BTCGuild PPS without using --failover-only.

I hope that at some point p2pool will become large enough to remove the variance. This will make it more attractive. Kind of a chicken and egg problem though. Need less variance to attract more people... need more people to achieve less variance.

Quote from: GernMiester on March 21, 2013, 11:14:27 PM

P2Pool ha..worst payouts I have ever had.

Read above.
P2Pool also had software problems until late last year that caused issues and lower-than-expected payouts.