Mining · Guide
Best solo mining pools: where to point your Bitaxe
Updated 19 July 2026 · about a 9 minute read
The pool you point a Bitaxe at does not change your odds of finding a block. Those are set by your hashrate against the whole network, and a single little miner against a thousand exahash is a lottery ticket whatever the label on the pool. What the pool changes is the fee it takes if you win, and who you're trusting to pay you when you do.
So none of these pools wins you more Bitcoin than another. What separates them is the fee, the track record, and how much sovereignty you want, and that's what this guide compares.
Three ways to solo mine
People muddle these constantly, so here's the distinction that matters.
- A solo pool. The pool runs a Bitcoin node and hands your miner work; you use your own BTC address as the username, no account needed. Everyone on it races independently. If your hardware finds the block, the whole reward - subsidy plus transaction fees - lands in your address, minus the pool's cut. That's the proper lottery, and it's what this guide is about.
- A normal pooled address. You can point a Bitaxe at a big pool like Braiins or Ocean and get steady, tiny payouts for your share of the pool's collective luck. It's predictable and dull, and a Bitaxe earns fractions of a penny. It is not solo mining, even though the setup looks the same. More on those below so you don't pick one by mistake.
- Fully solo, against your own node. Your miner talks only to a full node on your own network. Nobody else in the loop, no fee, and you pick your own transactions. Full sovereignty, a bit more setup. The endgame for a lot of people, and I've put it at the bottom.
The solo pools compared
Every one of these pays the finder the full block reward including fees, minus whatever's in the fee column, straight to your address. None needs an account.
| Pool | Fee | Account | Open-source | Track record |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Solo CKPool pick solo.ckpool.org | 2% | No | Software only | 22+ blocks in 2025 |
| Public Pool pick public-pool.io | 0% | No | Yes - self-hostable | Multiple Bitaxe wins |
| AtlasPool solo.atlaspool.io | 1.5% | No | ckpool-based | Newer, fewer finds |
| Mineshop Solo solo.mineshop.eu | 0% | No | No | None yet |
| NerdMiners.org pool.nerdminers.org | 0% | No | No | Community pool |
Fees read from each pool's own site, mid-2026. Solo Satoshi and D-Central publish pool guides but are hardware shops, not pool operators - treat their picks as vendor content. Sources: solo.ckpool.org, public-pool.io, atlaspool.io, and D-Central's independent 2026 pool comparison.
Which I'd point mine at
Two, depending on what you care about.
Solo CKPool if you want the proven one. It's Con Kolivas's, it's been up for years, and it found more than twenty solo blocks in 2025 alone. The 2 percent fee sounds like a lot until you remember it only ever costs you anything in the unlikely event that you win, and in that moment I'd rather be on the pool that has demonstrably paid people out. I can't fully justify how much weight I put on that track record - the payout mechanics of the newer pools may be fine - but a fee I'll almost certainly never pay feels like a cheap way to not find out the hard way.
Public Pool if the ethos matters to you. It's zero-fee, fully open-source, has real Bitaxe and NerdQaxe block finds to its name, and you can run it yourself on an Umbrel or Start9 node, which turns it into the fully-solo setup below. I haven't self-hosted it on my own node yet - that's the experiment on this page I still owe myself, and until I've done it I can't tell you where it gets awkward.
The newer zero-fee pools - Mineshop, AtlasPool - are worth knowing about. But a 0 percent fee on a pool that's never found a block means that, for the one moment that matters, you're trusting infrastructure nobody has watched handle a win.
The ones that aren't solo (don't pick these by accident)
A Bitaxe will happily connect to these, which is exactly how people end up not solo mining without realising.
- Braiins Pool is a pooled FPPS operation - steady tiny payouts for your share, around a 2 to 2.5 percent fee, and an account. Fine for what it is. Not a lottery.
- Ocean is more interesting - non-custodial, transparent, and a favourite of the sovereignty crowd - but its TIDES payout still spreads your reward across many blocks. Worth a look on principle, just don't mistake it for solo. You get paid for your shares, not for finding a block yourself.
The sovereign version: your own node
The purest way to do this is to cut the third party out entirely. Run your own full node - an Umbrel or Start9 box makes it a fairly gentle project - and point your miner at a solo pool running on your own hardware. Public Pool is built to do exactly this; so is ckpool-solo alongside Bitcoin Core. Zero fee, you keep every satoshi including the transaction fees, and you choose the transactions in your own block. If you win, nobody stood between you and the coinbase.
It costs you a synced node, a bit of storage, and keeping the thing online. For a lot of people that's the whole appeal - a Bitaxe on a shelf, mining against a node they run themselves, is about as sovereign as this hobby gets.
So: point it at CKPool or Public Pool, assume you'll never see a block, and if the sovereignty bug bites, graduate to your own node. If you've not got the miner yet, the Bitaxe Gamma is where I'd start, and once it's running, the overclocking guide squeezes a bit more out of it. The lottery-odds calculator does the sums on live network data if you want to see the odds you're playing.