[gruez]

>If you were to mine by yourself, you'd get zero pay outs unless you actually mined a block. It is possible, but the odds are on par with winning the lottery.

It's slightly better than that. A single 5700 xt mining ethereum can expect a block once every 43 months at current difficulty. That's still insanely high variance, but still far better than the lottery.

[patriksvensson]

Interesting, that IS slightly better than I expected, at least for Ethereum. So if we treat each block being found as a lottery "ticket" and that solo miner with a 5700xt on average can expect to mine a block ("win the lottery") once every 43 months....

For Ethereum:

1 block every 15 seconds

5760 blocks in a day

172800 in a month (30day avg)

7430400 blocks in a 43 month period.

So about 1 in 7 430 400 odds when solo mining. Pool highly recommended specially because Ethereum is moving away from the current system of mining long before 43 months from now!