Glossary / Mining & consensus
Solo mining
- Definition
- Solo mining means pointing your machines at your own node and keeping the entire block reward when you win, accepting that you may never win at all.
Payouts come as nothing, nothing, nothing, and then everything. A hobbyist machine holds a share of a network doing hundreds of exahashes per second, so the expected wait runs into thousands of years, and yet solo blocks keep landing: block 960,804 went to a solo miner on August 2, 2026 and paid 3.1569 coins. It is a lottery with honest odds and no ticket price beyond electricity.
How it works
Solo mining removes the pool from the picture, which changes the payout structure and nothing else about the search itself.
The machine still hashes headers exactly as it would in a pool. What differs is where the block template comes from and who the coinbase transaction pays. In the purest setup you run Bitcoin Core yourself, your miner requests templates from it, and the reward address is yours, so a winning block pays you directly with no intermediary and no fee. You also choose which transactions go in, because you built the template.
Most hobbyists use the middle option instead: a solo pool. Services such as solo.ckpool.org, run by Con Kolivas, provide the servers, the connection, and the block relay, but pay winner takes all rather than splitting rewards. The finder collects the subsidy and fees minus a 2 percent fee. The August 2026 win was the 317th solo block credited to that software, and the tally is public, which is why solo wins are checkable rather than folklore.
The odds are simple division. Your share of network hash rate, multiplied by 144 blocks a day, gives your expected blocks per day. A Bitaxe Gamma at 1.2 terahashes per second against a network near 850 exahashes has about one chance in five million per day, which averages out to roughly 13,000 years per block. A full sized 200 terahash machine gets that down to about 81 years. Neither number is a reason not to try; both are a reason not to plan around it.
Where you see it
Solo mining shows up wherever the point is participation rather than profit.
The obvious case is lottery mining with a small open source device on a desk, drawing less power than a light bulb, quietly checking hashes and occasionally making the news when a machine the size of a paperback finds a block worth six figures. The second case is heating: a machine that turns electricity into warmth produces hashes as a byproduct, so the marginal cost of the lottery ticket is genuinely close to zero in a cold climate. The third is ideological. A solo miner with its own node picks its own transactions, which is a small but real vote against pools deciding what gets confirmed.
What solo mining is not is a cheaper way to accumulate coins. Expected earnings are the same as pooled mining minus the fee difference, because the protocol pays for work, not for luck. All solo mining does is take the same expected value and concentrate it into one enormous, improbable payout. If you want bitcoin on a schedule, buy it on a schedule; if you want a ticket in the most honest lottery ever built, plug in a small miner and forget about it.