Quote from: mikeywith on Today at 01:41:32 AM

Quote from: Nexus9090 on July 30, 2025, 06:31:25 PM

I've heard this argument on a few occasions and technically it really doesn't hold water.

Mining solo to a local solo pool attached to bitcoin core has the same network delays as any other bitcoin node

This is obviously false. A local node running on a $30 router and $50 internet connection has nothing close to the same network delays as a pool node hosted in a specialized data center. Nodes in well-connected data centers have a much better chance of landing in more favorable peer topologies due to their uptime, reliability, and often higher bandwidth capabilities. Your node talks to a few peers, but the speed at which those peers then distribute your block to their peers and how many connections your node has -- creates a propagation tree. Your local node’s block will propagate slower globally compared to other nodes with single-digit millisecond latency to other mining nodes.

Also, pools use dedicated interconnections and relay networks (like FIBRE or Falcon), plus geographically distributed nodes. For example, FIBRE can announce the block header to peers (a few KBs) even before the full block is propagated. This tells other miners to start mining the next block on top of this one, so all major pools are already mining on top of that new block while your node is still mining on top of the previous block. The time it takes for the slow peer-to-peer network to globally propagate that block to your node is huge (5–15 seconds in some cases even more) compared to the sub-1-second UDP-based relay technology those pools use.

By the way, I encourage you to read studies such as "Effects of a Simple Relay Network on the Bitcoin Network," and I will quote a part of the abstract for you:

Quote

Results show that the propagation time decreases to approximately 77% of the original value if the utilization rate is set to 3%. This rate is close to the actual utilization rate of relay network "Falcon". We also found that the probability of blocks created by utilizing nodes to become orphan blocks is surprisingly smaller than that of the non-utilizing nodes. Even in the worst case, the value of utilizing nodes is 15% of the value of non-utilizing nodes.

You can also read "Bitcoin Blockchain Dynamics: the Selfish-Mine Strategy in the Presence of Propagation Delay."

There exist many studies that show how well-connected pools beat the average home nodes in orphan races. And even without those studies, it’s first-year IT school knowledge that shows the difference between propagating a few KB of data between high-end servers with gigabit-speed internet vs. a $300 laptop connected to a 100 Mbps line trying to propagate a 2–4 MB block.

Sorry but I simply dont believe this to be true.

Can you prove it?!?