Yes. It depends on how you use "solo"
Solo really means making your own blocks which is what DATUM does even if you're pooling.
Discussion
What is the incentive for making my own block? Is I am earning small rewards daily, does it matter that I have the ability to make my own block?
I am going to flip that question on its head a bit. What is the incentive NOT to make your own blocks? If you already run a node that has its own mempool, why would you want to be beholden to someone else dictating what your miner is hashing? What do you get out of that that you would not get if you created your own block templates?
In my mind, the only reason not to create your own block templates is if you aren't running a node. And then question is, why the heck aren't you running a node?
And then, yes. OCEAN gives a discount on the pool fee for those who use DATUM to create their own templates, and you pay zero pool fee whatsoever if you are lottery mining using DATUM. So the incentive is you get paid more in either scenario. Assuming you are fortunate enough to get paid at all in the lottery mining option.
It sounds like with DATUM there is no excuse to not make your own blocks now or rely on someone else to. And I agree, I feel mining and node running go hand-in-hand at this point. Obviously the lotto mining is a tough sell, that's where OCEAN comes in. It's all coming together. In the future it may be common for Nodes and miners to come packaged together. And then I'd love to see a way to plug in renewable energy tech to these devices. A bitaxe branded solar panel or hydro/wind turbine perhaps. 🤔 Maybe I'm thinking too far ahead
You're not thinking too far ahead: https://www.solosatoshi.com/product/solarbit/
There are currently only three reasons not to generate block templates yourself:
1. You don't run your own node and don't want to start.
2. You don't like OCEAN for some reason, such as preferring FPPS payouts rather than only getting paid when the pool finds a block.
3. You don't want to run Knots as your Bitcoin node implementation.
Woah, that is cool. I had not seen this yet. Man things are moving fast.
Knots makes sense to me and I had never really considered that seeing as Bitcoin core was the more common option.. but the deeper I dig the more I understand why. Competition is good, having choices is important, values and incentives need to align as we all hunt for the truth.