Solo mining vs pool mining

In pool mining, thousands of miners combine their hashrate and work together to find blocks. When the pool finds a block, the reward is split proportionally — you get a share based on how much work you contributed over a given window.

The result is small, frequent payouts. If the pool finds a block roughly every 10 minutes and you contribute 0.01% of the pool's hashrate, you'll receive 0.01% of the block reward, minus the pool fee — reliably, over and over.

The most common payout methods are:

• PPS (Pay Per Share) — you get paid for every valid share you submit, regardless of whether the pool finds a block. The pool absorbs the variance risk.
• PPLNS (Pay Per Last N Shares) — you get paid only when the pool finds a block, based on your shares in a rolling window. Higher variance, but often a higher long-term payout.

In solo mining, you keep the entire block reward if your miner finds a block — minus a small pool infrastructure fee, typically 0.5–1%. There is no sharing. If you find a BCH block right now, you get 3.125 BCH.

The trade-off: finding a block is a random event. Your miner is essentially rolling dice millions of times per second, competing against every other miner on the network. The more hashrate you have relative to the total network, the more often you'll roll a winner — but the randomness doesn't go away.

A solo pool like SoloPool.eu is the infrastructure layer that connects your miner to a BCH node and handles the block submission when you do find one. You're still mining solo — your payout isn't shared with anyone — but you're using shared infrastructure rather than running your own node.

Both strategies have the same expected value before fees. If your miner contributes 0.001% of the network hashrate, you "expect" to find 0.001% of all blocks over a long enough time horizon — equivalent to 0.001% of all block rewards. Pool mining and solo mining both deliver this in theory.

What's different is variance — how spread out the actual outcomes are.

The average time between solo blocks for a given miner is:

For example, if the BCH network hashrates at 3 EH/s and your Bitaxe runs at 500 GH/s:

(3,000,000 GH/s ÷ 500 GH/s) × 10 minutes = 60,000 minutes ≈ 41 days on average

The critical word is average. Block finding follows a Poisson process — you could find one in day 2, or mine for 200 days without one. Both scenarios are not unusual. The median time is actually lower than the mean (around 70% of the mean), meaning more than half of lucky streaks arrive earlier than the average suggests.

If your expected time between blocks is 40 days, there's roughly a 63% chance you find one within 40 days, a 39% chance within 20 days, and a 14% chance it takes over 80 days. These aren't small probabilities — variance here is real and significant.

Pool mining eliminates this variance entirely. You receive the expected value steadily, every day, as tiny fractions of each block the pool finds. Solo mining gives you the same expected value but concentrated into occasional large wins separated by dry spells.

This is where the BCH vs BTC distinction becomes genuinely important for anyone mining with a home device.

Bitcoin Cash uses the same SHA-256 proof-of-work algorithm as Bitcoin, so a Bitaxe, NerdQaxe, or LuckyMiner can mine BCH with zero hardware changes. But the BCH network hashrate is orders of magnitude lower than BTC's.

The practical effect: the same home hardware that would take thousands of years to solo-mine a BTC block has a realistic chance of finding a BCH block within months. The math simply works out differently.

Pool mining on BCH still gives you proportional payouts — but the individual payouts are smaller because BCH is worth less than BTC per coin. Solo mining on BCH keeps the entire 3.125 BCH block reward for yourself, which at any reasonable BCH price is a meaningful win for a home miner.

This doesn't mean you're guaranteed to find a block — the variance discussion above still applies. But the expected wait time measured in weeks or months (not decades) makes solo BCH mining a genuinely different proposition from attempting to solo-mine BTC.

There's no universally correct answer. It comes down to your hashrate, your financial situation, and honestly — your personality.

A common approach among home miners: start with a solo pool and treat it like a lottery. Your electricity costs roughly the same either way, and the upside of finding a whole BCH block is dramatically more satisfying than accumulating fractional pool payouts. If you mine for several months without a win and the dry streak bothers you, switch to a pool then.

The beauty of BCH mining is that you're not locked into either approach — there's no contract, no account to close. Change your stratum URL and you've switched strategy in under a minute.