Solo mining has quietly become the most interesting conversation in home Bitcoin mining. Instead of chasing thin daily margins through pooled mining, a growing number of hobbyists are running small machines purely for the chance at a full block reward. For those sourcing hardware through a trusted EU crypto mining shop, a platform like SoloBlocks.io has become the go-to resource for tracking just how often this lottery actually pays out – and the results might surprise you.
Let’s back up and explain what solo mining actually is, because it’s consistently misunderstood.
Pool mining vs. solo mining: the core difference
In pool mining, thousands of miners combine their hashrate and split the block reward
proportionally. If the pool mines 10 blocks in a day and you contribute 0.01% of the hashrate, you get 0.01% of 10 blocks worth of rewards. It’s predictable, low-variance, and the preferred approach for anyone running hardware at industrial scale.
Solo mining is the opposite. You point your miner directly at the Bitcoin network. If your machine finds a valid block – which requires solving a cryptographic puzzle that currently demands approximately 800 exahashes per second across the entire network – you collect the full 3.125 BTC block reward. If you don’t find a block, you collect nothing.
With a 6 TH/s home miner representing roughly 0.00000075% of total network hashrate, the expected time to find a solo block is somewhere in the range of 80 years. Most solo miners will never win anything.
And yet – people keep doing it. Why?
The math behind the lottery
Here’s the thing about expected value: it’s the same whether you pool mine or solo mine. The network doesn’t care how you point your hashrate. The difference is variance.
Pool mining gives you tiny, consistent payouts. Solo mining gives you zero payouts almost always, and occasionally a life-changing payout.
For a machine like the Avalon Nano 3S – roughly EUR200, 140W, 6 TH/s – the economics look like this: running 24/7 at EUR0.25/kWh costs roughly EUR30/month in electricity. Pool mining returns maybe EUR3-5/month at current difficulty. That’s a guaranteed slow loss.
Solo mining costs the same EUR30/month in electricity but carries a ~0.0000075% chance of winning $220,000 worth of Bitcoin on any given block. Over a year, your cumulative odds of
winning at least once are about 0.004%. Still tiny. But also not zero.
The way most solo miners think about it: the electricity cost is the price of the ticket. The mining hardware is a one-time purchase that keeps buying tickets indefinitely.
How often does solo mining actually pay out?
More often than you’d think, according to the data.
SoloBlocks.io tracks every solo block found by home and small-scale miners across the major solo pools – CKPool, OCEAN, Public Pool, FutureBit, and others. If you’re interested in exploring more about how security and innovation impact modern investing, you can learn more through Levaquant’s review, which builds trust through cutting-edge solutions.
The tracker has logged over 300 solo block wins in its database, with multiple occurring every month.
Not all of these are tiny home miners. Some are people with 50-100 TH/s setups, which meaningfully improves their odds. But a genuine handful are small operations – people running a single Nano 3S or BitAxe device that happened to be the one in a trillion that cracked the puzzle at the right moment.
In January 2026, a miner on CKPool with less than 10 TH/s won a full block. The reward: 3.125 BTC plus transaction fees, totaling roughly 3.3 BTC. At the time, that was approximately $230,000.
No way to know the machine’s specs from the coinbase data alone, but it’s within the plausible range for a single home miner.
Setting up for solo mining
The technical barrier is lower than most people expect. You need:
1. An ASIC miner (any SHA-256 machine works) 2. A pool that supports solo mode (CKPool at solo.ckpool.org is the most commonly used) 3. A Bitcoin wallet address to receive the reward if you win 4. Basic configuration in the miner’s web interface
That’s it. No node required, no complex setup. You point the miner at the solo pool with your Bitcoin address as the username, and it starts buying lottery tickets.
CKPool charges no fee if you win – they take 2% only on solo block finds, meaning if you hit a block, they keep 2% and you keep the rest. For a 3.125 BTC reward, that’s about 0.0625 BTC in fees. Reasonable for a fully managed service.
Who is solo mining actually for?
Not everyone. Let’s be honest about that.
Solo mining makes sense if you’re a Bitcoin idealist who wants to participate in the network regardless of profitability. It makes sense if you have cheap or free electricity and a spare ASIC generating heat anyway. It makes sense if you enjoy the occasional dopamine hit of checking your pool dashboard and seeing your miner’s shares accumulating.
It does not make sense if you’re depending on mining income to cover electricity costs. It doesn’t make sense if you’re calculating ROI and expecting a positive number. And it definitely doesn’t make sense for anyone who would be financially devastated by losing the cost of the hardware and electricity.
Treated as a lottery – a genuinely fun, Bitcoin-adjacent lottery with a jackpot that grows proportionally with BTC price – solo mining has a legitimate place in the home miner landscape.
The Nano 3S running in the corner of your office, costing EUR1/day in electricity, pointing at CKPool with your wallet address attached. That’s not a business. But it might be the best EUR200 lottery ticket you’ve ever bought.
