Quote from: henry_p on Today at 01:02:28 AM

Quote from: franky1 on Today at 12:15:26 AM

[...]
other pools dont waste their connections on that many random users
[...]
its not in the same hierarchy of the important nodes peer connections (pools and merchants) so it gets its last block delayed by atleast two peer 'relay times',
[...]
all of which gives pools an upper hand of multiple seconds compared to a home hobby miner doing it truly solo.

Thanks, that's exactly what I was asking about. That said, I didn't do the math, but 1% (or 2%) of in case I find a block within seconds of another blocks...

How many seconds of latency must a miner save for the odds of a block collision to decrease by 1%?

And don't I have to just trust the claim about being "well connected" or is there a way for a miner to verify that?

I am in no way saying that it doesn't have legitimate use case. "I'd rather pay a cut than having to bother with all that" is absolutely legit. As for the connectivity advantage, I still feel that the line is so fine that we may only guess whether it it is worth that 1% or 2%.

Though, considering the current value of the block reward, it's still difficult for me to think that the owner of a farm large enough to mine solo would not want to "bother" doing it itself.

the pool (looking at stats in previous posts) is not a farm
its ~2200 people with 5-6 asics each on average.
its hobby miners not farms

a block if we average it as 600 seconds.
imagine your a normal home user with 8 connections to peers and say there are 80,000 nodes to reach where each peer also has 8 connections

8*8*8*8*8=32k(4 relays) so your going to need 5 relays to reach 80k nodes meaning if each relay takes just 1 second that is atleast 5 seconds

then its the case that because you are not in the centre circle of the important nodes you are going to get previous block a few relays after the important nodes. which is another few seconds.

so just at relay delay of getting pre block and sending out your solved block is more then 1% delay(>6seconds)

however pools that are at the centre of the circle can reach the important nodes(otherpools and merchant tools) in 1 relay
so what might take you 7-10 seconds just in bandwidth time can be just 1-2 seconds for pools

then its the smaller millisecond math of how fast a blocktemplate can be formed and then sending the work to an asic and updated the asic with new work each time it runs out of extra nonces. generally a pool can do this and send it to your asic faster than a home hobby miner can do self managed locally.

so the 'speed benefit' might be 1.0x% but also a pool has lots of servers and thousands of bandwidth connections to cost in.
so 2% might not actually be unreasonable.