If I'm solo mining from the GUI, am I still helping the Monero network even if I don't ever "win" any blocks?

Question

I've been mining everyday for about 4 or 5 weeks now from the GUI, where you can just click the "advanced" icon and then click "start mining" icon. It asks me if I want to use the recommended # of threads which is 2 and I always do so. At bottom of screen I average only about 300 H/s and that's only about 1 in 10,000 chances of getting a block for a reward.

I assume I'll never earn anything doing this but I keep doing it because I've read things like "Solo mining helps strengthen the Monero network", "The more people that mine the harder it is for the network to be attacked", and "Every little bit helps".

So I was recently wondering, if I never work out a block, how am I helping mine anything? Hence, how am I helping the Monero network if my computer is never finding any block solutions? Am I helping the network at all?

Thank you!

Answer 1

I average only about 300 H/s and that's only about 1 in 10,000 chances of getting a block for a reward.

300 H/s is significantly worse than "1 in 10,000". Network hashrate at time of writing is 2.458 GH/s.

I assume I'll never earn anything doing this

Probably not, but you might get lucky.

...if I never work out a block, how am I helping mine anything?

More mining equals more network hashrate which ultimately drives up the difficulty to mine the next block.

Think about it like this: If there were 10M people solo mining with 300 H/s each, the network hashrate would be 3 GH/s, and so for a single entity to 51% attack the network they'd need a sustained ~1.53 GH/s. Hence each of those 10M solo miners are strengthening the network.

Now, whether you mine a block or not is kind of immaterial, the point is you could. In the above example, every ~120 seconds, one of those 10M people mining will be the lucky one that mines a block.

Am I helping the network at all?

Yes, just not very much.

Answer 2

It depends on what you call "helping" here. It will become apparent with an analogy:

Imagine Alice lost her wedding ring on the beach. She's distraught, and isn't sure where she lost it exactly, but wants to find it. She shouts "$100 to who finds my wedding ring", and some of the beachgoers nearby start looking.

Now, it's a small ring, there aren't that many people looking, the ring may have been covered by a layer of sand already, etc. Most people will not find the ring. Only one person will. call him Bob. if the search lasts long enough. But is only the person who finds the ring helping Alice ? If none of the people who don't find the ring had not searched, Bob would still have searched the same area and found the ring, but it was not known in the first place that the ring was in the area where Bob ended up looking.

Now if Carol also loses her wedding ring on the beach and people start looking again, the same will happen: only one person will find it, but the more people look, the faster the ring will be found. So in that sense, everyone is helping speed up the search, even those who do not actually find any ring.