Quote from: OhTheFuture on Today at 02:58:38 AM

So, if we wanted to allocate a % of hashrate to a solo situation, using something like CK pool would be just as effective as mining to a node we had onsite/physically closer to our miners, themselves?

On paper, mining against your own node is "better", but in the real world, it's not, because running mining a node is not easy, and there is a huge difference between just a node and a mining node, a mining node needs to be perfectly connected to the other mining nodes, letting the other miners (in today's world 'pools') know that you found a block as fast as possible is key, so that they stop working on the current block and thus reduce the chances of orphan blocks.

In fact, I won't be surprised if large pools have some other means of communicating outside of bitcoin network to allow fast block proportion, also if your node goes down for whatever reason like a server issue, the consequences for a mining node are devastating, not saying it's impossible, but it's close to impossible to maintain a mining node on your local PC with your home grade router and an internet connection, you need to spend a good amount of money for a dedicated server that meets all basic requirements.

Solo pools do all of that for you for FREE, and charge you a tiny bit of fee in the event of finding a block, I say free because it's free, they charge you nothing if you don't find a block, which isn't the case when renting a server, you will have to pay those fees wether or not you find a block, so really, it's a no-brainer when it comes to mining, if you want to run a mining node for the sake of helping with BTC decentralization -- go for it, but don't risk losing a whole block while paying more fees just to mine BTC.

Quote

That's the takeaway I've came to with this thread. The orphan block comment was mainly what I was trying to understand, I guess.

Ya, it's pretty much that, just think of it this way, if large pools with mining nodes spread all over the globe using super high-end servers and dedicated gigabit connections still lose orphan races once in a while, how bad is it going to be for me running a mining a node on my 3 years old laptops with 10mbps shared connection?

Quote

What about working with smaller pools? Is that a thing? Where you combine forces/hashrate to a solo-like endeavor with a group of other similar minded miners trying to survive. ?

You can use trusted small pools like Kano.is, the total hashrate there is pretty small so if the pool happens to hit a block, you get some heavy payouts, other people like willi9974 use a different approach where he collects say 10 folks, each of them pays x amount of BTC and they rent some good hashrate and point it to cksolo pool hopping to hit a block.