Litecoin & Dogecoin Solo Mining

What are the main practical differences between pooled and solo mining?

In pooled mining, rewards are generated at an address controlled by the pool, which then distributes them to miners according to a reward scheme. In solo mining, on the other hand, whenever a miner finds a block the rewards are generated directly at the miner's own address.

Another practical difference is that, because solo miners only ever get rewarded when they find a block, and finding a block can take much longer when not pooling resources, the statistical variance of rewards is much higher. This means that over a given period of time a miner could make much more or much less than expected, depending purely on luck. The effects of variance become less noticeable the higher a miner's hash rate is, which is why solo mining is a perfect fit for larger mining operations. In the case of small miners, on the other hand, solo mining is sometimes called “lottery mining”, because one has a small chance of getting a very large reward, and a high chance of getting nothing.

Are Litecoin and Dogecoin mined at the same time?

Yes. With LiteSolo, you are performing fully merged mining of Litecoin and Dogecoin.

Are block transaction fees paid out to miners?

Yes. Every time you find a block you receive the entirety of its rewards, including the block subsidy and all transaction fees, minus the 1% service fee.

How much is the reward for finding a block?

The Litecoin block subsidy is currently 6.25 LTC (halving every 4 years). The Dogecoin block subsidy is 10000 DOGE. When you find either type of block, you receive the associated block subsidy, plus any transaction fees included in the block, minus the 1% service fee.

Can I use any Litecoin/Dogecoin address?

You should only use addresses from wallets to which you own the private keys.

Can I mine to a deposit address provided by an exchange, online wallet, or other custodial service?

It is technically possible, but we strongly advise against it. If you really must, make sure you check in advance that the service providing the address supports receiving deposits in the form of newly-generated coins output by a coinbase transaction.

What is a coinbase transaction?

A coinbase transaction is a special type of transaction that generates new coins and distributes transaction fees to miners. Every block contains exactly one coinbase transaction. In the case of pooled mining, this transaction credits coins to a wallet controlled by the pool, which is then responsible for distributing the coins to its miners according to a payout scheme. In the case of solo mining, the coins are generated directly at the miner's address.

A block's coinbase is not to be confused with the exchange platform Coinbase, which is named after it.

Are there any restrictions on worker names?

Worker names can be up to 15 characters long, and may only include basic (ASCII) letters, digits, and underscores.

Do I need to specify my Dogecoin address in the configuration of each of my miners?

Yes. Every miner-server connection is independent, and so is its configuration. You may even provide a different Dogecoin address for each of your miners. If any of your miners does not provide a Dogecoin address, it will not generate Dogecoin rewards for you.

Why do miners still need to submit shares, even though in solo mining only blocks matter?

Shares are used to provide users with statistics such as the hashrate of their workers, and to verify that miners are active and working properly.

Can I set the job difficulty manually?

Yes, but in most cases it is unnecessary. By default, our servers automatically adjust job difficulty to match your miner's hashrate. You can override this behavior and request a static difficulty N by appending ,d=N to a miner's password. For compatibility reasons, the value will be automatically rounded to the closest power of two. It may also be capped, at the server's discretion, in order to prevent denial-of-service attacks.

Can I use NiceHash with this service?

Yes, LiteSolo is fully compatible with NiceHash.

Why doesn't the hashrate reported on the website change when my miner's does?

Miners do not submit hashrate information to mining servers, so we have to estimate hashrates based on how often shares are submitted. In order to obtain precise estimates, we consider a miner's work over the past 60 minutes. For that reason, the hashrate estimates shown on the website are 1-hour averages, which do not react quickly to sudden changes in speed.

Why am I finding more Dogecoin blocks than Litecoin blocks?

Even in merged mining, each coin retains its independently adjusted difficulty. Since Dogecoin targets a quicker block time compared to Litecoin (1 minute vs 2.5 minutes), its network difficulty is almost invariably lower than Litecoin's, and therefore finding Dogecoin blocks is more common.

What is the meaning of the block CCDF?

In the context of solo mining, the CCDF (complementary cumulative distribution function) is a mathematically rigorous measure of a miner's (bad) luck in finding blocks. More specifically, it is the probability a miner had of finding more blocks than they actually did, given the amount of work they put in. A low CCDF indicates good luck, while a high CCDF indicates bad luck. For example, if a miner achieves a CCDF of 30%, it means that they had a 30% chance of finding at least one more block than they did; in other words, only 30 out of 100 miners operating under the same conditions would have been luckier.

If your CCDF is below 50%, it means that you have been luckier than most miners, meaning that most miners would have needed to put in more work than you did to find as many blocks as you did.

If you have yet to find your first block, the CCDF can also simply be interpreted as the probability you've had of finding it so far.