Bitcoin’s network hashrate sat around 920 EH/s in mid-August 2026, according to Hashrate Index’s August 17 roundup, with difficulty at 127.48T after the August 8 adjustment. Those numbers make solo mining a Bitcoin block sound like a joke. It isn’t quite one. A single Bitaxe Gamma running at roughly 1.1 TH/s has an expected time to find a block of about 13,900 years, per a 2026 Bitaxe comparison from D-Central Technologies, or an annual probability near 0.007%. People still do it anyway, and the reasons are less about profit and more about learning how mining actually works, running your own node, and owning a genuine lottery ticket that pays 3.125 BTC plus fees if it hits. This tutorial walks through setting up a real solo mining rig with a Bitaxe open-source ASIC, connecting it to Solo CKPool or Public Pool, and locking the whole thing down so a mistake doesn’t cost you the block you eventually find.

What Solo Bitcoin Mining Actually Means in 2026

Pooled mining splits a block reward among thousands of participants based on submitted shares, so you get small, frequent payouts. Solo mining does the opposite. You point your hardware at a solo pool, submit shares only to prove your hashrate is real, and collect nothing until your own machine finds a full block. When that happens, you keep nearly the entire reward instead of splitting it. It’s a binary outcome: mostly zero, occasionally 3.125 BTC (roughly $240,000 at an August 2026 price near $77,000 per BTC, per CoinMarketCap) plus whatever transaction fees rode along in that block.

The appeal isn’t expected value. At home-mining hashrates, expected value is negative once you account for electricity. The appeal is variance and control. You run your own Bitcoin node, validate your own blocks, and skip the counterparty risk of trusting a pool operator with custody of shares over weeks or months. Open-source ASICs like the Bitaxe line made this affordable: a single board draws under 25 watts and costs under $250, instead of requiring an industrial rack of Antminers.

This guide treats solo mining as what it is: a hobbyist project with a real security surface. A misconfigured payout address or an exposed management port doesn’t just cost you efficiency, it can cost you the one block you’re chasing. Every step below includes the security check that goes with it.

Why the Bitaxe Became the Standard for Home Solo Mining

Before the Bitaxe project, home solo mining meant repurposing an old industrial ASIC, usually loud, power-hungry, and running closed firmware you had to trust blindly. The Bitaxe changed that by open-sourcing the entire stack: schematics, firmware, and the AxeOS web dashboard, all published on GitHub under the bitaxeorg and skot organizations. Anyone can audit the code that touches their payout address instead of trusting a vendor’s black box.

Two boards dominate the current lineup. The Gamma uses the BM1370 chip, the same silicon found in the Antminer S21 Pro, and runs single-board hashrate that dwarfs earlier Bitaxe generations. The Supra uses the older BM1368 chip and trades some hashrate for a lower price and cooler, quieter operation. Both ship as bare boards you assemble yourself or as pre-built units from third-party retailers, and both run the identical open-source firmware covered in this tutorial.

SpecBitaxe GammaBitaxe Supra
ASIC ChipBM1370 (5nm, S21 Pro-class)BM1368 (5nm, S21-class)
Stock Hashrate~1.0-1.2 TH/s~0.7 TH/s (625-775 GH/s)
Power Draw~18-21W~12W
Efficiency (tuned)~15 J/TH~16-18 J/TH
Retail Price (from)CAD 224.99CAD 184.99

Pricing above reflects a Canadian retailer’s August 2026 listing and will vary by region and vendor, so treat it as a rough benchmark rather than a fixed price. Both boards are small enough to sit on a desk, run quiet enough for a bedroom, and draw less power than a couple of LED light bulbs, which is a large part of why solo mining moved from industrial warehouses back into hobbyist living rooms over the past two years.

Prerequisites: Hardware, Software, and Accounts

Gather everything before you start. Swapping parts mid-setup is where most people introduce mistakes.

  • A Bitaxe-family ASIC board. This guide uses the Bitaxe Gamma (BM1370 chip, the same silicon as the Antminer S21 Pro, roughly 1.0-1.2 TH/s stock and 18-21W) as the reference device, with notes for the cheaper Bitaxe Supra (BM1368 chip, about 0.7 TH/s, roughly 12W).
  • A USB-C cable capable of both power and data, plus a 5V/3A (or better) USB power supply.
  • A 2.4GHz WiFi network. Bitaxe boards do not support 5GHz-only networks.
  • A computer on the same local network for flashing and configuration, running a modern Chromium-based browser (Chrome or Edge) for the WebUSB flasher.
  • A Bitcoin address you control the private key or seed phrase for, generated by a wallet you already trust. Do not use an exchange deposit address.
  • Roughly 30-45 minutes for the initial setup, more if you plan to tune frequency and voltage afterward.

You do not need to run your own Bitcoin full node for this tutorial. Both Solo CKPool and Public Pool run their own nodes and relay work to you over the Stratum protocol. Running your own node is covered in the advanced tips section, since it removes a third party from the equation entirely.

Your Real Odds: Hashrate, Difficulty, and Expected Time to a Block

Set expectations before you plug anything in. Bitcoin’s network hashrate has floated between roughly 898 and 938 EH/s across multiple August 2026 snapshots from Hashrate Index, Rax.ae, and Minerstat, settling near 920 EH/s by mid-month. Difficulty adjusted to 127.48T on August 8, 2026. A single Bitaxe contributes a rounding error to that total, so the math below is a straight linear extrapolation from D-Central’s published 13,900-year figure for a 1.1 TH/s Gamma, treated as an approximation rather than a guarantee. You can check the live figures yourself any time on mempool.space, which tracks current hashrate and difficulty directly from the chain.

HashrateApprox. HardwareExpected Time to Find a BlockAnnual Probability
0.7 TH/s1x Bitaxe Supra~21,800 years~0.0046%
1.1 TH/s1x Bitaxe Gamma~13,900 years~0.007%
4.4 TH/s4x Bitaxe Gamma~3,475 years~0.029%
20 TH/sSmall home rack~765 years~0.13%

Read that table as a lottery odds table, not a business plan. It’s why solo mining sits alongside cold storage and seed phrase hygiene in the broader hardware wallet security conversation: the payoff is rare and the setup mistakes are what actually determine whether you enjoy the process or regret it.

Electricity Costs and Why This Is a Hobby, Not an Income Plan

Run the numbers before you plug in, because the electricity bill is the only part of this project that’s guaranteed. A Bitaxe Gamma pulling around 18-21W at the wall, run continuously for a full year, works out to roughly 175 kWh of electricity. At a residential rate of $0.12-0.15 per kWh, common across much of the United States, that’s somewhere around $21-26 a year, or a few dollars a month. That’s a rough illustrative estimate based on the board’s published power draw, not a guarantee, since actual rates and efficiency vary by region and by how hard you push the overclock.

Compare that modest yearly cost against the odds table above and the conclusion is straightforward: you’re not going to mine your way to a return on a $225 board and $25 a year in power. What you’re buying is closer to a recurring lottery ticket with a near-zero but nonzero payout, plus the side benefit of a working, self-contained mining setup you fully understand and control. If the electricity cost bothers you, running two or three boards off the same power supply barely changes the yearly bill while proportionally improving your (still minuscule) odds, which is the appeal of the multi-Bitaxe fleets covered in the advanced tips section below.

Step 1-3: Unbox, Power On, and Flash the AxeOS Firmware

Step 1. Inspect the board for shipping damage, then connect the USB-C cable to a computer, not directly to a wall charger, for the first boot. The onboard OLED display should light up and show a boot sequence within a few seconds.

Step 2. Most Bitaxe boards ship with a recent AxeOS build already installed, but you should confirm you’re on the latest release before configuring a pool. The firmware, called ESP-Miner, and its AxeOS web dashboard are maintained as open source in the bitaxeorg/ESP-Miner and skot/ESP-Miner GitHub repositories. Only ever download firmware binaries from those repositories’ Releases pages, never from a link in a forum post, Discord message, or random mirror site. Firmware for a device that touches your Bitcoin address is exactly the kind of software supply chain attackers target.

Step 3. To flash or update firmware over USB, open the official web flasher in Chrome or Edge (WebUSB doesn’t work in Firefox or Safari). Hold the BOOT button on the board for about three seconds, plug in the USB-C cable while still holding it, then click Connect in the flasher page. Select your exact board revision and the firmware version you want, then start the flash. Always pick the version from the ESP-Miner Releases page rather than an arbitrary “latest” build someone linked you, since release notes call out breaking changes and known issues for each version.

# Verify the firmware binary you downloaded matches the published release
# before flashing anything that will hold your mining payout address.
sha256sum esp-miner-factory-401-v2.10.0.bin

# Compare the output against the checksum listed on the GitHub Releases
# page for that exact tag. If it does not match, do not flash it.

If the board already shipped with a current AxeOS version, you can skip the USB flash entirely and update later from within the dashboard, which is faster and doesn’t require holding the BOOT button.

Step 4-5: Connect to WiFi and Open the AxeOS Dashboard

Step 4. On first boot without a saved network, the Bitaxe starts its own WiFi access point, typically named something like Bitaxe_XXXXXX. Connect a phone or laptop to that network, and a captive portal should prompt you for your home WiFi’s SSID and password. Enter your 2.4GHz network credentials and the board will reboot and join it.

Step 5. The board’s OLED screen displays its new local IP address, something like 192.168.1.42. Type that address into a browser on a device on the same network to open the AxeOS dashboard. This is a plain HTTP interface on port 80, with no TLS by default, which is exactly why it should never be exposed past your local router.

The dashboard shows live hashrate, temperature, fan speed, shares accepted, and best difficulty found so far, all pulled from the device’s own API. You can query that same API directly from a terminal for scripting or monitoring later:

curl -s http://192.168.1.42/api/system/info | python3 -m json.tool

# Example output
{
  "hashRate": 1123.4,
  "temp": 58.2,
  "power": 19.1,
  "voltage": 1210,
  "frequency": 525,
  "bestDiff": "142.3M",
  "sharesAccepted": 8842,
  "sharesRejected": 3,
  "poolUrl": "solo.ckpool.org",
  "poolPort": 3333,
  "isUsingFallbackStratum": false
}

Step 6-8: Configure a Solo Pool

This is the step that determines whether a found block actually pays you. Get the Stratum URL, port, and username exactly right, because a typo in the username field on a solo pool means a typo in the Bitcoin address that would receive 3.125 BTC.

Solo CKPool

Solo CKPool, run by Con Kolivas, is the longest-running anonymous solo mining service and needs no account signup. It charges a 2% fee, but only if you find a block, so if you never find one, you never pay anything. Point your miner at:

# AxeOS Settings -> Pool
Stratum URL: solo.ckpool.org
Stratum Port: 3333          # port 443 works as a fallback if 3333 is blocked
Stratum User: bc1qxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.bitaxe1
Stratum Password: x

The username field takes your Bitcoin address directly, optionally followed by a period and a worker label such as .bitaxe1, which is useful if you run more than one device against the same address. The password field is ignored by the pool, but AxeOS requires something in it, so a single character like x is standard practice.

Public Pool

Public Pool, an open-source project built specifically around Bitaxe devices, runs its hosted instance at 0% fee. It also offers a web dashboard where you can watch your hashrate and best difficulty without SSHing into anything.

# AxeOS Settings -> Pool
Stratum URL: public-pool.io
Stratum Port: 21496
Stratum User: bc1qxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.bitaxe1
Stratum Password: x

Neither service requires you to create an account or hand over any identifying information. Both are pay-on-find and non-custodial: a found block pays straight to the coinbase address you configured, with no balance sitting on a third-party server waiting to be withdrawn. AxeOS also supports a fallback pool field, so you can list Public Pool as primary and Solo CKPool as backup (or vice versa) in case one has downtime.

Step 9: Lock In Your Payout Address

Before saving your pool settings, verify the Bitcoin address character by character, not just the first and last few digits. Address poisoning attacks work by sending a near-identical address to your wallet’s transaction history, hoping you copy the wrong one from memory or from clipboard history later. For a mining payout address specifically:

  • Generate a dedicated receive address just for mining, separate from your everyday spending wallet, so a found block lands somewhere you can sweep to cold storage deliberately.
  • Paste the address directly from your wallet software into the AxeOS field. Never retype it from a screenshot, a note-taking app, or a message someone sent you.
  • After saving, reload the AxeOS Settings page and re-read the stored address back against your wallet, not against your memory of what you typed.
  • If your wallet supports it, confirm the address on the device screen itself (for a hardware wallet) rather than trusting what the software display shows.

This is the same discipline covered in our seed phrase security guide, applied to a payout field instead of a backup phrase. The stakes are lower per-transaction, since most miners never find a block, but the one time it matters, it matters completely.

Step 10: Harden Your Mining Rig’s Network Security

AxeOS listens on plain HTTP with no authentication by default, which is fine on a trusted home LAN and dangerous the moment it’s reachable from the internet. Three risks matter most for a home Bitaxe setup: an exposed management port that lets an attacker rewrite your pool username to their own address, a compromised firmware source that plants a backdoor before you ever flash it, and a spoofed pool domain that looks like CKPool or Public Pool but silently redirects your shares (and any found block) elsewhere.

Mitigate all three the same way: keep the miner off any port forward, verify firmware sources before flashing, and double-check the exact domain and port in your pool settings against the official ones listed above.

# On your router or a Linux gateway box, confirm the miner's local IP
# has no inbound port forwarding rule and can't be reached from WAN.

# Quick local check with ufw on a Linux firewall sitting between the
# miner's VLAN and the internet:
sudo ufw deny in on eth0 to 192.168.1.42 port 80 proto tcp
sudo ufw deny in on eth0 to 192.168.1.42 port 22 proto tcp
sudo ufw reload

# Confirm the device is unreachable from outside your network by
# testing from a phone on cellular data, not WiFi:
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" --max-time 5 http://YOUR_PUBLIC_IP:80

If your router supports VLANs or a guest network, put IoT-class devices like the Bitaxe on a segmented network that can’t see your main computers, NAS, or password manager. A single-board ASIC running an unauthenticated web server has no business sitting on the same broadcast domain as your primary devices.

Step 11: Tune Frequency and Voltage Safely

Stock settings are conservative. Most Bitaxe Gamma boards can be pushed from roughly 1.0-1.2 TH/s at stock toward a higher ceiling by raising ASIC frequency and core voltage in the AxeOS Settings page, at the cost of higher power draw and heat. Overclocking a solo miner doesn’t meaningfully change your odds of finding a block in absolute terms, but it does raise your best-difficulty submissions and squeeze more hashrate per watt if you’re running a small fleet.

# Example AxeOS overclock payload, applied via Settings -> ASIC
# Increase in small increments and monitor temperature after each change.
{
  "frequency": 550,
  "coreVoltage": 1250,
  "autofanspeed": true,
  "fanspeed": 100
}

# Push this via the API instead of the UI if you're scripting a fleet:
curl -X PATCH http://192.168.1.42/api/system \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"frequency":550,"coreVoltage":1250}'

Raise frequency in steps of 10-25 MHz and voltage in steps of 10-20 mV, watching the temperature reading after each change. Anything consistently above roughly 65-70°C at the chip is a sign to back off or improve cooling, since ASIC chips degrade faster and throw more rejected shares when run hot for long periods.

Step 12: Set Up Monitoring and Alerts

A solo miner that silently goes offline for three days isn’t losing you a payout, since the expected time to a block is measured in millennia either way, but it is losing you uptime toward that already-tiny probability. A simple health check script catches WiFi drops, overheating shutdowns, and pool disconnects before they go unnoticed for a week.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# bitaxe-healthcheck.sh - run every 15 min via cron on a local machine
MINER_IP="192.168.1.42"
WEBHOOK_URL="https://your-webhook-endpoint.example/alert"

STATUS=$(curl -s --max-time 5 "http://${MINER_IP}/api/system/info")
HASHRATE=$(echo "$STATUS" | python3 -c "import json,sys; print(json.load(sys.stdin).get('hashRate', 0))" 2>/dev/null)

if [ -z "$HASHRATE" ] || (( $(echo "$HASHRATE < 100" | bc -l) )); then
  curl -s -X POST "$WEBHOOK_URL" \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d "{\"text\":\"Bitaxe at ${MINER_IP} is offline or hashrate dropped below 100 GH/s\"}"
fi

Both Solo CKPool and Public Pool also expose per-address dashboards you can bookmark to check accepted shares and best difficulty without touching the local network at all, which is handy for checking on a rig you're not physically near.

What It Actually Looks Like When You Find a Block

Most of the time your AxeOS dashboard and the pool's web dashboard just show a rising share count and a "best difficulty" figure that never gets close to the network target. A found block looks different. Both Solo CKPool and Public Pool log the event immediately and it shows up in a few places at once: the pool's own recent-blocks page, your local AxeOS log, and eventually a new transaction appearing on any block explorer once it confirms.

# Example of what a block-found event looks like in the AxeOS system log
# (Settings -> Logs, or via the WebSocket log stream)
[2026-08-21 03:14:07] INFO  New job received, height=912441, diff=127.48T
[2026-08-21 03:14:52] INFO  Share submitted, diff=891.2M
[2026-08-21 03:15:03] INFO  Share submitted, diff=1.4B
[2026-08-21 03:15:19] WARN  *** BLOCK SOLUTION FOUND *** height=912441
[2026-08-21 03:15:19] INFO  Submitting to pool: solo.ckpool.org:3333
[2026-08-21 03:15:20] INFO  Pool accepted block submission

That log line is the entire event. There's no separate confirmation step on your end, no button to click, and no withdrawal request to file. The pool's software constructs the coinbase transaction with your configured address baked in before you ever submit the winning share, so payment is a direct consequence of the block being accepted by the network rather than something the pool operator decides to send you afterward.

Once it happens, check the transaction on a block explorer like mempool.space using the block height from your log, confirm the coinbase output matches your address, and let it accumulate the standard confirmations before treating the funds as final. From there, the sensible move is the same as any other windfall: sweep the balance to the cold storage setup you already trust rather than leaving it sitting on a hot wallet address tied to a mining rig.

Solo CKPool vs Public Pool vs Joining a Shared Pool

Solo mining isn't the only option once your Bitaxe is flashed and configured, and it's worth understanding what you're trading away by choosing it over a shared pool.

OptionFeePayout StyleAccount NeededBest For
Solo CKPool2% (only on a found block)Pay-on-find, full coinbase to your addressNoAnonymous solo mining, established uptime track record
Public Pool0%Pay-on-find, full coinbase to your addressNoZero-fee solo mining, live web dashboard for Bitaxe fleets
Shared pool (PPLNS/PPS)Typically 0.5-2%Frequent small payouts based on shares submittedUsually yesSteady, predictable (if small) returns instead of lottery odds

A single Bitaxe is realistically never going to out-earn its electricity cost through a shared pool either, since payouts there scale with your share of total network hashrate, and one board is a rounding error against 920 EH/s. If you want predictable (if tiny) daily payouts, a shared pool makes more sense. If you want the actual lottery-ticket experience of solo mining, CKPool and Public Pool are both legitimate, non-custodial choices with different fee and dashboard tradeoffs.

5 Common Pitfalls That Cost Solo Miners Their Setup (or Their Block)

  1. Typing the payout address by hand. A single transposed character sends any future block reward to an address you don't control, permanently, with no chargeback mechanism on the Bitcoin network to undo it. Always paste, never retype, and re-verify after saving.
  2. Flashing firmware from an unofficial mirror. Only the bitaxeorg and skot GitHub organizations distribute official ESP-Miner builds. A modified binary hosted elsewhere could quietly swap your pool address in the background, and you'd have no way to notice until a found block paid out to the wrong place.
  3. Port-forwarding the AxeOS dashboard "just to check it from work." The dashboard has no login by default. Exposing it to the internet hands anyone who finds it full control over your pool settings, and internet-wide scanners actively probe for exposed IoT admin panels like this one within hours of a port opening.
  4. Overclocking without watching temperature. Pushing frequency and voltage up without monitoring chip temperature shortens ASIC lifespan and increases rejected shares, which is wasted electricity for no benefit. Change one setting at a time and give it a few minutes to stabilize before pushing further.
  5. Treating a single Bitaxe as an investment instead of a hobby. At 920 EH/s network hashrate, a lone board's expected time to a block runs into the thousands of years. Budget the electricity cost as the price of a hobby, not a return on capital, and you'll enjoy the project a lot more than if you're checking a spreadsheet every night.

Troubleshooting Guide: 8 Common Issues

  • Board won't show a WiFi access point on first boot. Hold the reset button for 10 seconds to force a factory reset of saved network credentials, then power cycle. If the OLED display stays blank the whole time, the issue is more likely the power supply than the network stack, so try a different USB-C cable before troubleshooting WiFi further.
  • AxeOS dashboard is unreachable at the IP shown on the OLED. Confirm your computer is on the same subnet, not a guest network or VLAN the miner can't reach. Try ping to the address first, and if that fails, check your router's connected-devices list to see whether the Bitaxe actually joined the network or is still broadcasting its own setup access point.
  • Hashrate reads 0 or fluctuates wildly. Usually a power supply issue. Swap to a rated 5V/3A+ supply and a shorter, higher-quality USB-C cable, since voltage sag under load is the most common cause and gets worse with longer or thinner cables.
  • Shares are rejected at a high rate. Check the temperature reading first, then confirm your Stratum URL and port exactly match the pool's published values with no typos or extra whitespace. A rejection rate above a few percent that persists after a reboot usually points to a marginal power supply rather than a pool-side problem.
  • "Pool not responding" or frequent reconnects. Try the alternate CKPool port 443 if 3333 is blocked by your ISP or router, or switch to Public Pool's fallback slot temporarily. Some ISP-provided routers throttle or block non-standard outbound ports by default, so check your router's firewall log if the problem is consistent rather than intermittent.
  • WebUSB flasher doesn't detect the board. Confirm you're using Chrome or Edge, not Firefox or Safari, and that you held BOOT before plugging in the USB-C cable, not after. A USB hub can also interfere with WebUSB device detection, so connect directly to a laptop or desktop port if a hub is in the chain.
  • Board overheats and throttles or shuts down. Add or upgrade a fan, ensure the heatsink is seated flush, and roll back any overclock until the chip stays under roughly 65-70°C. Ambient room temperature matters more than people expect, so a board that runs fine in a cool basement may throttle in a warm attic office.
  • Firmware update fails partway through. Don't power-cycle mid-flash. Wait for a timeout, then retry the USB web flasher method, which is more resilient to interruption than the OTA update and gives clearer error messages when something goes wrong.

Advanced Tips: Fleets, Open-Source Alternatives, and Stratum V2

Once one Bitaxe is running cleanly, a few upgrades are worth considering if you want to go further.

Running Your Own Bitcoin Node

Solo CKPool and Public Pool both run their own full nodes so you don't have to, but pairing your Bitaxe with a self-hosted node (via a package like ckpool-solo running against your own bitcoind) removes a third party from block template construction entirely. This is a heavier setup, closer to running your own Bitcoin Lightning node, but it means you validate every transaction that goes into a block you might mine.

Multi-Bitaxe Fleets and Other Open-Source ASICs

Running several Bitaxe boards against the same payout address (each with a distinct worker label like .bitaxe1, .bitaxe2) is the simplest way to scale hashrate while keeping every board on the same open-source firmware and security model. The Bitaxe community has also spun off related open-source ASIC projects worth knowing about if you're comparing hardware beyond the official Gamma and Supra boards, though specs and pricing vary by project and are worth verifying directly against each project's own GitHub page before buying.

On the protocol side, Stratum V2 is the next-generation mining protocol designed to add encryption and let individual miners, not just pool operators, choose which transactions go into the block template they're working on. Bitaxe firmware support for Stratum V2 is still maturing relative to the long-established Stratum V1 connections used throughout this guide, so check the current AxeOS release notes on GitHub before assuming a given firmware build supports it.

The Complete Working Config

Here's the full setup recap in one place, ready to copy into AxeOS Settings once you've verified your own payout address character by character.

# --- Primary pool (Public Pool, 0% fee) ---
Stratum URL: public-pool.io
Stratum Port: 21496
Stratum User: YOUR_BTC_ADDRESS.bitaxe1
Stratum Password: x

# --- Fallback pool (Solo CKPool, 2% fee on found blocks only) ---
Fallback Stratum URL: solo.ckpool.org
Fallback Stratum Port: 3333
Fallback Stratum User: YOUR_BTC_ADDRESS.bitaxe1
Fallback Stratum Password: x

# --- Network hardening (applied on router/gateway) ---
# 1. No inbound port forward for the miner's local IP
# 2. Miner isolated on a guest VLAN, not the main LAN
# 3. Firmware sourced only from bitaxeorg/ESP-Miner or skot/ESP-Miner releases

# --- Monitoring ---
# bitaxe-healthcheck.sh via cron every 15 minutes, alerting on hashrate < 100 GH/s

That's a complete, working solo mining rig: one Bitaxe, a verified firmware source, a primary and fallback pool with no account requirements, a network that can't be reached from outside your home, and a monitoring script that tells you when something breaks instead of finding out three days later.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is solo mining with a Bitaxe profitable?
No, not in the traditional sense. At roughly 1 TH/s against a network hashrate near 920 EH/s, the expected value of block rewards over any realistic timeframe is far below the electricity cost. Treat it as a hobby with a lottery-ticket upside, not an income source.

What happens if I actually find a block?
The pool's coinbase transaction pays the block subsidy (currently 3.125 BTC) plus all transaction fees in that block directly to the Bitcoin address you configured as your Stratum username, minus the pool's fee if you're on Solo CKPool. It's non-custodial and typically confirms within the same block cycle.

Is Solo CKPool or Public Pool safer?
Both are non-custodial and pay directly to your address, which is the important safety property. Public Pool charges 0% fee and includes a hosted dashboard. Solo CKPool charges 2% only if you find a block and has a longer operating history. Neither ever holds your funds in between.

Can I mine solo without any pool at all?
Yes, by running your own Bitcoin full node and a local Stratum server like ckpool-solo pointed at it, but that requires maintaining node sync and uptime yourself instead of relying on the pool operator's infrastructure.

Why does AxeOS have no login page?
It's designed for a trusted local network, not the open internet. That's exactly why Step 10 in this guide covers keeping it off any port forward and, ideally, on an isolated VLAN.

How hot should a Bitaxe run?
Most guidance keeps the ASIC chip temperature under roughly 65-70°C. Consistently higher readings call for better airflow, a bigger heatsink, or dialing back an overclock.

Do I need to keep my computer on for the miner to keep running?
No. Once configured, the Bitaxe operates independently over WiFi and only needs power. Your computer is only needed for initial setup, firmware flashing, and checking the dashboard.

Should I use my main wallet address or a dedicated mining address?
Use a dedicated receive address just for mining payouts, generated from a wallet you already trust, so any found block lands somewhere separate from your everyday spending funds and you can sweep it to cold storage on your own schedule.

For more on securing crypto infrastructure end to end, visit the Cryptocurrency section.