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Eureka

The primer

Home mining. In plain English, for Australian bitcoiners.

If you're new to this: solo mining is you, alone, against the whole Bitcoin network. Most of the time you lose. Very occasionally, you win a 3.125 BTC block reward on a desk-sized device. Here's how it works, and why Aussies are increasingly good at it.

What is a solo miner?

A solo miner is someone running a bitcoin mining device (an ASIC) pointed at a solo pool — not a traditional pooled service like Foundry or Antpool. On a solo pool, you either find a whole block and keep (almost) the full reward, or you find nothing. There's no smoothing, no daily FPPS payouts.

Most solo miners in Australia are running a Bitaxe, a NerdQaxe, or an Avalon Nano — hobby-scale devices that hash 0.5–5 TH/s on 10–200 W. You can power one from a USB-C charger and run it on a desk.

Solo mining vs solo hashing — a quick nuance

You'll hear these two terms used interchangeably. They're not quite the same thing:

  • Solo hashing is what almost everyone on this site is actually doing: pointing your rig at a solo pool (ausolo, Parasite, Public-Pool, etc.). The pool builds the block, accepts your shares, and pays you the reward if your share happens to solve the network difficulty. Easy to set up — just paste a stratum URL and your wallet address.
  • True solo mining means running your own bitcoin node + your own mining daemon, building your own block templates, and broadcasting the block yourself when you find it. No pool. No third party. Harder to set up, but the purest version.

Why would anyone do this?

Your chance of finding a block is always your hashrate ÷ the total network hashrate. That denominator keeps growing — so the odds any single Bitaxe has of striking a block don't improve with time; they dilute. That's the nature of a proof-of-work network under sustained investment.

So the point isn't the payout. It's what you're participating in:

  1. Network resilience. Every watt of home hashrate is a watt that isn't concentrated in a commercial farm. Every solo block is one that couldn't be censored, reordered, or template-filtered by a handful of pools. The network gets harder to capture with every Bitaxe that plugs in.
  2. Learning how Bitcoin actually works. There's no faster way to understand the protocol than to run a miner. Shares, difficulty, stratum, coinbase transactions, block templates — all of it stops being abstract the moment your device is submitting real shares to a real pool.
  3. Stacking sats at source. Pooled payouts drip daily, solo payouts are rare but whole-block. Either way you end up with sats you earned directly — no exchange, no KYC, no counterparty other than the pool.
  4. Heating. In Victoria or Tasmania, mining watts become room-heating watts. See the heating article.

Shares vs the block — what your miner is actually doing

Every few seconds your Bitaxe submits a share to the pool. Shares are cheap: they're partial solutions that meet the pool's (much easier) difficulty threshold, and they exist to prove your miner is alive and hashing. On a solo pool they don't earn you anything directly.

Occasionally — rarely — a share is so lucky it also meets the network difficulty, which is roughly 110 trillion as of writing. That's the block threshold. When that happens, the pool broadcasts your block to the network and you get the reward. Every share is an independent lottery ticket.

The Australian angle

Three things make solo mining in Australia materially different from the US or EU experience:

  1. ausolo.ckpool.org exists. A dedicated Oceania endpoint of CKPool. Your stratum latency is under 10 ms from Sydney — the lowest anywhere on the planet.
  2. Our power prices are varied. AU$0.35/kWh on peak retail is brutal. AU$0.16/kWh on a Tasmanian controlled-load tariff is free money. Solar feed-in at 5c/kWh makes daytime diverted-to-mining watts a ~2× improvement. Use the calculator.
  3. The community is tight. Every Aussie Bitaxe block-find gets celebrated in group chats within minutes. Parasite Pool has an outsized Aussie presence. ausolo has a devoted user base even though it's technically a global pool.

A note on terminology

When we say "last 2016 blocks" on the home page, that's a rolling 2016-block window ending at the current tip — not the fixed difficulty-retarget interval (which is aligned to specific heights and resets every 2016 blocks from genesis). Both are ~2 weeks of history; the rolling version just stays current. We reserve "epoch" for halving cycles (210,000 blocks) to match Braiins Academy and Bitcoin Optech convention. We're currently in the post-2024-halving epoch with the block reward at 3.125 BTC.

What Eureka shows you

  • Live feed: every solo block we can see across 12 pools, in AEST — with 2016-block-window stats for how often solo blocks hit.
  • All blocks: the 200 most-recent solo-mined blocks with pool, coinbase tag, reward and an AU flag on ausolo-tagged rows.
  • Breakeven calculator: real AEMO retail tariffs per state, with solar and off-peak scenarios.

Next steps

If you want to try this for yourself:

  1. Read the Bitaxe assembly guide.
  2. Run the breakeven calculator at your electricity price. Adjust for solar if you have it.
  3. Pick a pool. If you want the lowest latency, ausolo.ckpool.org. If you want community, Parasite. Full comparison.
  4. Buy the gear from shopbitcoin.com.au (shipped from Australia — no customs lottery).
  5. Bookmark this site. Check back when someone, somewhere, strikes gold.