How to Solo Mine Bitcoin at Home: Odds, Cost and Hardware

Solo Bitcoin mining means pointing your own miner at a solo pool or your own node so that the full block reward of 3.125 BTC plus fees goes to you if your miner finds a block. No pool shares the payout, and no pool shares the odds. With a home miner between 250 KH/s and 14 TH/s that happens rarely, which is why these devices are called lottery miners. This guide explains how it works, how to set it up in five steps, what your odds and your power costs really are, and which miner makes sense for which budget.

What is solo Bitcoin mining

Every ten minutes on average the Bitcoin network adds one block. Whoever finds it gets the block reward, currently 3.125 BTC, plus the transaction fees in that block. In pool mining, thousands of miners combine their hashrate, and the pool splits every reward by contribution: small, regular payouts. In solo mining your miner works on its own block template. If it finds a block, the whole reward goes to your Bitcoin address; until then it earns nothing.

A solo pool such as public-pool.io does not change that. It only hands your miner the block templates and forwards a found block to the network; some solo pools charge a small fee for that, the preset public-pool.io currently charges none. The odds stay yours alone. That is why a small solo miner is called a lottery miner: a tiny chance every ten minutes, and a full reward if it hits.

How solo mining works

Your miner receives a block template from the pool or from your own node, tries billions of variations per second and sends back every result that is above the share difficulty the pool asked for. Those shares prove that the miner is working; they are not paid. A block is found when one of those results is also below the target set by the current network difficulty. The network adjusts that difficulty every 2,016 blocks, roughly every two weeks, so that a block keeps arriving every ten minutes no matter how much hashrate joins.

The consequence for a home miner is simple: your chance per block is your hashrate divided by the hashrate of the whole network. Nothing else, not the time of day, not the age of the device, not how long it has been running, changes that ratio. Every block is a new draw.

How to solo mine Bitcoin: step by step

1. Choose a miner. The NerdMiner V4 is the smallest lottery miner: 250 KH/s at about 1 W over USB-C, a learning device with a real but tiny chance. The Bitaxe Gamma (1.3 TH/s, 17 W) and the NerdAxe Gaia (2.6 TH/s, 25 W) are the first step into real hashrate. Four and eight chips give you the NerdQAxe++ and the NerdOctaxe Rev 3.1. Hashrate and power of every miner in one table.
2. Get a Bitcoin address. Use an address from a wallet you control, ideally a SegWit address starting with bc1q. A hardware wallet is the safest choice. Never use a deposit address from an exchange: some exchanges change them, and a block reward would go astray.
3. Pick a solo pool or run your own node. All our miners come preset to public-pool.io, which currently charges no fee; pools that do charge one deduct it from a found block only. If you want no third party at all, a LiquidBox V5 runs a full node with a pool app at home, and your miner works against your own node.
4. Set up the miner. Every device has its own guide: NerdMiner V4, Bitaxe, NerdAxe, NerdQAxe++ and NerdOctaxe, LiquidBox. In short: connect to the setup network the miner opens, enter your 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi and your Bitcoin address, save, restart. About ten minutes.
5. Check shares and best difficulty. After a few minutes the display and the pool page show shares arriving. That is the sign that everything works. The "best difficulty" value is the highest share your miner has found; a block needs one above the current network difficulty.

Your odds per device

The chance to find a block on a given day is your hashrate divided by the network hashrate, times the 144 blocks of that day. On 23 September 2026 the network hashrate was about 920 EH/s (source: mempool.space, three-day average); one EH/s is a million TH/s. With that value the numbers for our miners look like this:

"Expected time" is the average over an infinite number of tries, not a promise of anything. A block can come on the first day or never; the odds are the same every ten minutes. The network hashrate grows over time, so check the current value on a block explorer before you quote these numbers to anyone. In July 2026 a single Bitaxe with about 1 TH/s found block 957382, according to the pool it mined on, against odds of roughly 1 in a billion for that block, which shows both sides of the coin: it happens, and it is rare. Whether a smaller SHA-256 chain shortens that wait, and what a block there is worth, is worked out in our article on what a Bitaxe can mine.

What it costs to run in Europe

Power is the only running cost. A month has about 720 hours, so the monthly consumption is watts times 720 divided by 1,000. With typical European household tariffs the bill per month is:

The heat is not wasted in winter: a NerdQAxe++ is a 70 W heater that also hashes. Efficiency in J/TH tells you how much of the power turns into hashrate; the Gaia at 10 J/TH is the most efficient board in our range, the Gamma runs at 13 J/TH, the NerdQAxe++ at 15 J/TH.

Solo mining vs pool mining

For a home miner the pool payout is so small that many people prefer the lottery ticket. Both work on every device we sell: enter any pool address in the settings.

Can you solo mine with an Antminer

Yes. Any SHA-256 miner can point at a solo pool; an Antminer-class machine has a far larger chance per block than a desktop miner, but it also draws around 3 kW, needs a circuit of its own and is loud enough for a garage, not a living room. At 0.30 EUR/kWh a 3 kW machine costs about 650 EUR a month in electricity, which is why solo mining with an Antminer in a European flat is rare. The desktop miners on this page exist for the opposite case: a quiet device on the desk with a real, small chance and a power bill you do not notice.

Blocks found by home miners

It does happen. In July 2024 a Bitaxe found block 853742 and collected the reward minus the pool fee; the operator of the pool put the miner at about 3 TH/s, early reports at 500 GH/s. On 10 July 2026 a single Bitaxe with about 1 TH/s found block 957382, according to the pool it mined on, and the whole reward of about 3.138 BTC went to one address. A Bitaxe Gamma today hashes at 1.3 TH/s, a NerdOctaxe Rev 3.1 at 12 TH/s. Every one of those hashes is a ticket in the same draw.

Is solo mining worth it in 2026

As an investment: no. At 1.3 TH/s the expected time to a block is measured in thousands of years, and no amount of luck changes the average. As a hobby the picture is different. A Bitaxe Gamma costs less than 4 EUR a month in electricity at 0.30 EUR/kWh, teaches you how mining, difficulty and block templates work, and gives you a real, independent piece of the Bitcoin network on your desk. If a block comes, it pays 3.125 BTC plus fees. If it never comes, you have spent the price of a coffee a month.

Who should try it: people who want to understand Bitcoin from the inside, supporters of open-source hardware, anyone who likes a small chance at a large number. Who should not: anyone who expects a return, has very expensive electricity, or wants a silent room; the four- and eight-chip boards have fans you hear.

Which miner for solo mining

• Budget and learning: the NerdMiner V4, 250 KH/s at about 1 W, silent, runs from any USB port.
• First real hashrate: the Bitaxe Gamma, 1.3 TH/s at 17 W, the reference desktop miner.
• Efficiency: the NerdAxe Gaia, 2.6 TH/s at 25 W and 10 J/TH.
• Most hashrate on one board: the NerdOctaxe Rev 3.1, the strongest air-cooled miner in our range with 12 TH/s at 200 W, or the water-cooled NerdOctaxe Hydro with 14 TH/s.
• No third party: add a LiquidBox V5 and mine to your own node.

All of them are in the shop, shipped from the EU with VAT included, and side by side on the Bitcoin lottery miners page. Not sure between the smallest and the next step up? NerdMiner vs Bitaxe compares the two side by side, and the Bitaxe category and the NerdMiner category list what each one is for.

FAQ