Definition
Solo mining is the practice of mining cryptocurrency independently, where you run your own mining operation and keep 100% of the block reward if you successfully mine a block, instead of sharing rewards with a pool.
Why It Matters for Solo Mining
Solo mining is literally what this entire site is about—it’s the purest form of mining where you compete directly against the entire network. The main appeal is keeping the full reward (currently 3.125 BTC plus transaction fees after the most recent halving), but you face extremely high variance. Most small miners might never find a block, but when they do, it’s life-changing money. It’s basically lottery mining with better odds than actual lotteries.
How It Works
When you solo mine, your hardware connects directly to a full node running the blockchain (or to a solo pool that acts as a middleman). Your miner receives block templates through protocols like Stratum or getblocktemplate, then tries billions of hash combinations per second to find a valid block.
Your chances depend entirely on your hashrate compared to the total network hashrate. If you have 1 TH/s and the Bitcoin network is at 700 EH/s, you have roughly a 1 in 700 million chance per block. The expected time to block might be thousands of years, but you could get lucky and hit one tomorrow—that’s the whole point.
Unlike pool mining where you submit shares and get small regular payments, solo mining is all-or-nothing. You either find a valid block and get paid huge, or you find nothing and earn zero.
Example
A miner running a Lucky Miner LV08 with about 500 GH/s might expect to wait 30,000+ years to find a block mathematically, but some solo miners hit blocks within months. That’s the variance in action—it’s unpredictable but thrilling. The NerdQaxe++ Rev 6.1 famously found a $342K block, proving that even tiny hashrates can win.