In this chapter, we are assuming that you have your hardware connected and configured. Take a look at the previous chapters if you need help with configuring your mining hardware. Here, we will concentrate more on setup and the factors that will affect your decision to mine all by yourself versus mining with a pool.
Solo mining is the process of mining where a miner performs all calculations by him/herself. Any blocks found are credited to the miner and all rewards are kept by the miner. In solo mining, the miner competes against all other miners, pools, and individuals to solve a block.
Mining solo can be thought of as mining in a pool where you are the only worker. Instead of connecting to a pool, you will connect to your wallet and the wallet will act as a pool. The wallet gives the mining software all the necessary details in the form of a candidate block in order to start hashing it away. Therefore, running a wallet known as a full node is required for solo mining.
