Solo mining Bitcoin: the honest lottery
Solo mining is Bitcoin's all-or-nothing mode: no shared payouts, no drip of satoshis — you earn nothing until your own hardware finds a whole block, and then you get the entire reward. The odds are astronomical and we'll show them to you exactly. What's changed is the entry price: it used to take your own full node and a config nightmare; today it's a free open pool, a BTC address, and any device that can hash — including the phone in your drawer.
1 · How solo mining works
A normal mining pool aggregates everyone's hashrate, wins blocks regularly, and pays each miner a steady sliver. A solo pool keeps the coordination but drops the sharing: every miner works on their own block candidate paying their own address. Find a valid block and the full reward — currently 3.125 BTC plus transaction fees — lands in your wallet. Don't, and you earn nothing, for however long that takes. Every hash your device computes is one independent try at a new draw that happens roughly every 10 minutes, forever.
2 · Why entering got easy
3 · The odds, with no rounding in our favor
Your chance of a block is simply your slice of the network. Bitcoin hashes at roughly 880 EH/s (July 2026) — that's 880,000,000,000,000,000,000 hashes per second. Against that:
| Hardware | Hashrate | Chance per year (24/7) | Average wait |
|---|---|---|---|
| ESP32 gadget miner | ~78 kH/s | ≈ 1 in 215 billion | ≈ 215 billion years |
| 8-core phone (Primo) | ~90 MH/s | ≈ 1 in 190 million | ≈ 190 million years |
| Entry USB ASIC (Bitaxe-class) | ~1.2 TH/s | ≈ 1 in 14,000 | ≈ 14,000 years |
| Datacenter ASIC | ~200 TH/s | ≈ 1 in 84 | ≈ 84 years |
For scale: a year of nonstop phone mining is roughly one EuroMillions jackpot ticket — except this ticket re-enters a new draw every 10 minutes and the jackpot is 3.125 BTC. People have hit it on small hardware; that's what makes it a lottery and not a scam. But it is a lottery. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling a "mobile mining" app that mints their token, not Bitcoin.
4 · Hold a ticket with hardware you already own
Any Bitcoin address whose keys you control works as the login (if lightning strikes, you want the reward in your wallet). Then, on any ARM device — phone in Termux, Raspberry Pi, SBC:
This is a real session from an 8-core ARM board (thread-pinning lines trimmed, nothing else):
On the Android app instead: Configuration → Algorithm → sha256d, pool URL as above, wallet = your BTC address + .workername, password x.
5 · What you'll see (and won't)
Notice the diff 100000.000 in that session — that's the share difficulty the pool assigns, sized for ASIC hardware. At 90 MH/s a share of that difficulty lands about once every two months, so a phone will show very few "Accepted" lines on a solo pool, and the pool's web dashboard (which estimates hashrate from shares) may read close to zero. That's cosmetic, not a problem. Shares are only the pool's bookkeeping — your lottery ticket is every hash your device computes locally, and the hashrate line in the miner is the proof it's working. A block-winning hash beats the share target by definition; it would be submitted and it would win.
Want the steady drip of accepted shares instead? That's what regular (shared-payout) pools are for — but at CPU hashrates those earnings round to zero anyway, which is why the lottery is the honest way to run SHA256d on this hardware. For actual CPU revenue, mine Verus or Monero.
6 · If you catch the bug
If solo-lottery mining grabs you, the honest upgrade path isn't more phones — it's an entry-level USB ASIC (Bitaxe-class, ~1.2 TH/s): four orders of magnitude more tickets for about the power draw of a phone charger. The phone is the free taste. It's also, watt for watt, ~1,000 ESP32 gadget miners you didn't have to buy.