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Recently the NiceHash platform has made available a new feature on their platform that that they call Solo Mining with “Catch the Block” and we have decided to try our luck and see if we can manage to hit a block and get the full block reward. NiceHash have made this new feature very easy to be used, almost like buying lottery tickets and testing your luck hitting a big reward. What you do here is buy a package of hashing power from their platform that will be used for mining a certain crypto coin for some time, and if you validate a block with it then you get the full block reward. All you need to do is choose a mining package (pay for it with Bitcoin) and wait for it to finish mining and see if you were lucky enough or not to hit a block and get a nice reward. Currently mining Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), ZCash (ZEC) and Dogecoin (DOGE) are supported by thins new mining feature and you have a couple of different mining packages that you can choose from…
In order to be able to use the Solo Mining mode you mist first have an account at NiceHash and then also have some Bitcoin (BTC) transferred to your platform wallet that you would be using to pay for the mining packages you want to purchase. That may require a certain level of verification if you are registering a new account. Also have in mind that in order to receive your reward you would need to be Tier 2 verified (not required to try your luck) and that requires identity and address verification! There are 3 different mining packages available – Bronze, Silver and Gold with 3 levels of each (S, M and L) available so 9 different packages in total. Bronze is for Zcoin (ZEC), Silver is for DOGE although the L level is for Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Gold is for Bitcoin mining.
Each of the mining packages available is priced differently with the lowest one starting at sub $2 USD at the moment and the highest priced one is a little shy of $200 USD. The higher the price goes, the more hashing power and time you get to try and validate a block, thus your chances are getting higher. The more you pay however the less you will get if you manage to validate a block, but the chance of doing so is higher (the probability is listed for each package and it varies). With 1:3 or 1:4 probability the chances are high, but you can still buy a mining package and get nothing in return, so maybe not as much like a lottery, but more like gambling.
When you buy a mining packages shortly it starts mining and showing you how much time is left and how are you doing trying to validate a block for the specified crypto coin the mining package you bought for. There is no need to have the page open or anything, it will run for the specified time and you can find the results and your luck afterwards. Of course, there are some pretty graphics that are showing should you decide to spend time watching how things are progressing.
We’ve decided to start with the S or Small mining package for the three options available and then get three of each, so 9 in total for a total of 0.0009 BTC or about $17.37 USD with the current price of Bitcoin. Each of the packages ran for about 1 hour and although we got high percentages of being close to hit the reward, we did not have enough luck and did not manage to pull off validating any blocks with our 9 “lottery tickets”.
If you click on the smaller icon in the ACTIVE order section of any of the purchased mining packages you will get a more detailed graph and stats with information about it, so if you are curious and want to spend more time watching as things progress you can do so. Or you can just leave it to finish and then return to see the results of your luck or chance and if you managed to score any rewards or not and decide to maybe try again or not.
The mining duration you get for the S-sized package is about 1 hour, for the M-sized one it is about 2 hours and for the L-sized one it is about 4 hours. There is no exact mention of the amount of hashpower you get with each of the packages, but on the detailed page you see how the spending of the amount paid in BTC is progressing.
There is a dedicated page showing all of your completed orders as an easy to view list including how close were you to hitting a reward and if any of the mining packages you bought actually managed to hit a block and score you are reward. If you click on any of the packages listed on the COMPLETED orders page you will also get a more detailed full stats for the whole mining time of the package, similar to the detailed data you can watch during the actual mining.
The closest we got a reward with our 9 S-sized mining packages was 89% on a Bronze S package for mining ZCash (ZEC) and that one had 1:118 chance according to the data when purchasing the package, so pretty good, although a little disappointed that we were not lucky enough to hit a block and get a reward. Maybe will give it a couple more tries and you are welcome to try your own luck with a few mining packages and see if you can manage to score a block reward or not.
Update: Meanwhile we have also given it another try with one package of the second M-sized levels for each and unfortunately our luck has not improved much and again we did not get to validate a block on either of the three crypto currencies with the higher mining packages. We are not ready to give up yet, so next come the L-sized ones, hopefully with better results or we are getting completely disappointed from our luck today, but maybe you would have better luck than us.