Just for the fun of it I setup the Gingeropolus pool software on my VPS. I have 5 GTX 1050ti, 2 RX470,1 R9 390x, 1 R9 270, and 3 HD7950s. This is roughly bring me 4kh/s hashing power.
What are my chances of discovering a block at this hashrate and current difficulty?
Solo mining is a lottery unless you have a few dozen GPUs
Target block time in Monero is 2 minutes, based on that and your share in the network hashrate you can calculate how frequently you will find blocks.
Let H be the network hashrate, and h be your own hashrate. Then on average you will find a block every
t = 120 / (h / H) = 120 * (H / h) (seconds) = (H / h) / 720 (days)
Now let t and t' be your "substantial enough" target, in seconds and days accordingly. You can find minimum h / H ratio to achieve it, i.e. a proportion of the net hashrate you must own:
h / H = 120 / t = 1 / (720 * t')
If H is known, your minimum hashrate to achieve that is
h = H * 120 / t = H / (720 * t')
Current network hashrate is ~125 MH/s (Jul 19, 2017), so with 4 KH/s you'll have to wait for 43 days on average to find a block, meaning that you can easily have zero payouts during a month or two.
Finally, let's calculate how much hashrate you currently need to get payouts at least once a week on average (bear in mind that H tends to grow over time):
h = 125000 / (720 * 7) = 24.8 KH/s
You can easily calculate.
Divide the network hashrate with your hashrate and multiply by average block time. The result ought to give you a rough estimate of time between 2 blocks.
With 4kH/s that is about every 42 days to find a block (on average, with network hashrate of 120MH/s).
The decision is yours :)
