Pool or Solo? Which is better?

I have grown my farm gradually. Since the beginning on may, I have found 6 blocks, 5 were won after entering spacepool. If I have chosen Solo all the way, I should have 12 chias now. But I have only 8.57 now. So what is your opinion? Solo or pool?

Whichever one you’re not on probably…

Many are wondering about this I am sure. It would be nice to run a ‘what if’ scenario to see how things could have been if one had chosen the other option, but I think the largest factor is ‘luck’.

From my limited knowledge of pooling, it’s a relatively small but constant income of XCH, with the chance of 0.25 XCH on top of your pool earnings if you happen to win a block.

Solo is zero income unless you win a block, in which case it’s 0.25 + 1.75 XCH.

You back your horse and run with it I guess.

I’ve never pooled, and am never likely to now I am invested in solo farming. I have currently 420 TiB of plots, starting from zero and increasing by about an average of 12 plots per day, since around June 2021. I have won 16 XCH so far and am past my ETW by a week so I suspect another 2 XCH will be along soon.

Had I have been pooling, where would I be now ? Who knows…

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I have 80 TB in one rig, and i never won a XCH and i’m close to achieve 2xch trough pool. Another rig with 30tb i had, i earned 0,25 trough a pool in less time. Digital Spaceport did this test https://www.youtube.com/c/DigitalSpaceport

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Just have to wait your turn at the cookie jar!!!

I don’t trust pools. So I go solo.

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There not really a “better” here in this choice. It comes down to a combination of farm size and personal preference I suppose.

Over (a long enough period of)time the rewards should equal out, and only the pool fee is deducted compared to solo.

Pools require some trust, although with the chia way of doing it the trust required is pretty low.

Solo has the problem of farmer performance, which can be hard to diagnose. A pool on the other hand gives you constant feedback on partials submitted and earnings are consistent as well.

For me the choice comes down to the farmer size. If your estimated time to win is something like a month you may very well go 3-4 months without winning any block. My brain cannot deal with this and I start obsessing about there being something wrong with my farmer. I pool, it gives me peace of mind. ’
If your ETW is short enough, you don’t have this problem so much and I would go solo in that case.

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really depends on your farm size. Small, go to pool, big, really doesn’t matter

Wrong. Don’t dismiss small farms to go solo.

I have a small farm with 38 TiB (390 plots). I was in spacepool for 6 months and I only earned 0.8 xch. I left pool after finding a block with them. Then I mined another 2 blocks for a total of 4 xch.

This is purely luck. You may earn more with less plots than having a big farm.

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I recently won a block with just 6TB on solo. I started farming in October and then just left it to run in total neglect so it was quite a surprise to find 2 XCH in my wallet. I just plotted another 2 x 4TB sas disks and invested in another 10 x 4TB sas disks, these were solo since solo partially paid for them. For those just starting out who want to be reassured by seeing a trickle of income and the support of others in the same boat then pools are useful, I have 2TB in pools.

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What is the size of a small farm? I have 200 TB space. Ä°s it small?? I think yes. ? :blush:

The math is clear. Pool or solo, after a long enough time you will end up making the same (minus pool fees if you pool).

But if you are a tiny solo farmer, that long enough time can be very long.

All the stories of “My 10TB farm just won 2 blocks in 24 hours solo!” are not indicative of anything.

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Pool, I found 3 blocks and I have been mining with 370 Tb since June (gradually plotted until end of July). I now have 16 Chia from pooling.

Ok this was funny.

After reading here a few weeks ago, I decided to take the plunge and go solo for a while (april 13th)

Today I went to look at my farm and checked the farming rewards, no change.
I then decided; you know what this is not for me because I am going to get too annoyed after going a while without any win.

So I went to the pool tab to switch it back to pooling and there it was…1.75 unclaimed reward :money_mouth_face:
I set my farmer reward address to cold wallet so the 0.25 doesn’t show up anymore in the farmer overview.

My fist Solo Block! :tada: :tada: :tada:

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I found 7 blocks last month while pooling, good month to have been solo if I had been.
I see no sense going solo now, my luck could be on vacation for a while.

As a never-pooler, I would suggest you ponder just how ecstatic you would have been if you had been solo for those 7 blocks. What a rush :boom: !

Which to be? Pretty sure luck does not accrue - every chance to win is independent of any other - past or future. I.E., 7 more blocks could be incoming any time!

Why not join us (come back?) on the wild side, win BIG or not at all :partying_face: :cry:

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I may, I didn’t want to pool , went to pool as my old 8350 couldn’t handle my farm very well, but since .3.3 my responses are much much better.

I resisted Pooling for a while, but finally switched to FlexPool back in Dec. So far in the last 6 months it’s been close to a wash (pool actually a slight advantage). But the bigger thing for me is the Flex Farmer software. That has been a huge time saver for me. Stale shares are almost non-existent and it proactively notifies you of issues such as dropped drives, duplicates, etc. I can quickly look at the graph and if the Reported Space and the Effective space are close to the same number, all is good. I spend almost no time managing the Farm now whereas when I was solo mining, there was always something going wrong. The other benefit is I don’t have to worry about new Chia releases and whether they’re stable or not.

I know of few people talk smack about flex farmer, but it’s been a positive for me. I also use Flex Pool for my ETH mining so it is nice to have all in one location.

I have 1.3 PB and earn about 9 XCH per month. I have it set up to pay at 2 XCH and that happens about every 7-8 days. So that on top of the .25 for blocks usually comes to around 9 XCH. The best I’ve done in terms of winning blocks was back in Jan and Feb I won 5 blocks each month, so that would have been more like 11 XCH if I was solo. But March was only 3 Blocks and April was only 2. So my plan is to stick with pooling unless the above significantly changes.

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I dont like that flex signs for you, I hear good things about it, it’s just not for me.