How would I ever know if my solo miner found a block?

Question

I've tried solo mining in two ways:

• using cgminer, ASIC and ckpool
• using minerd connected to my own instance of bitcoin-qt.

Either way, I've never seen any indicator showing that I have mined 0 BTC, let alone > 0. What would it look like if I did beat the odds and mine some BTC?

Answer 1

cgi miner shows

A:   The number of Accepted shares
R:   The number of Rejected shares

minerd reports yay or boo. see What do `minerd`s feedback messages (LONGPOLL, yay, boo) mean?

Answer 2

You could try solo mining another SHA256 PoW coin with a much lower difficulty factor, just to see what it looks like when your setup does solve a block and it's accepted by the other nodes in the network.

A couple of low difficulty SHA56 PoW coins to try:

• Deutsche eMark (DEM) has a current difficulty factor of 2844931 (https://github.com/emarkproject addnode=5.9.141.86 )
• FireFly Coin (FFC) has a current difficulty factor of 0.00186396 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=318589.0. addnode=91.206.16.214)