Alright, I need some real talk from the mining community. With all the mega-pools and industrial mining farms dominating Bitcoin and Ethereum, is there any realistic point for a regular person with a few ASICs or a powerful GPU rig to even consider solo mining anymore? Or is it just a guaranteed way to burn electricity for a lottery ticket with near-zero odds? I'm nostalgic for the idea but don't want to be naive.

Fantastic question that gets to the heart of mining decentralization. The short answer is: it's still a theoretical possibility, but for major coins like Bitcoin, it's almost purely a conceptual hobby rather than a viable income strategy. Here’s the breakdown. However, solo mining isn't completely dead. It finds niche value in a few scenarios: 1) Mining new or very small-cap coins at their launch, where the network difficulty is low and a single GPU can still find blocks. 2) For educational purposes, to deeply understand the blockchain process. 3) Some miners join "solo mining pools" that bundle their power but let them claim a full block reward if their specific contribution solves it. A detailed article on Paybis really lays out the harsh math and the few remaining use cases clearly. It's a sobering but necessary read: https://paybis.com/blog/glossary/solo-mining/