// blog · · by Nathan Baldwin
// When to point your Bitaxe at a pool, when to go solo. The math on payout variance, expected revenue, and what each stratum config looks like.
A Bitaxe Gamma at 1.2 TH/s pulls in about $5–6 per month on a pool right now. The same Gamma pointed at a solo CKPool earns $0 most months and ~$295,000 once every 11,800 years. Same hardware, same hashrate, same electricity bill — wildly different return profiles.
Which one makes sense for your Bitaxe comes down to whether you want a slow trickle of sats or a lottery ticket. The math is more interesting than people give it credit for.
A mining pool aggregates hashrate from thousands of miners and shares any block reward proportionally. When the pool finds a block (currently 3.125 BTC), it pays each miner based on how much hashrate they contributed during the relevant window. Most pools use PPLNS (Pay Per Last N Shares), which means your payout depends on shares submitted in the recent past — usually the last few hours.
Your share submission rate is what AxeOS tracks as “Best Difficulty” — the highest-difficulty valid nonce your chip has found. The pool assigns you a per-device difficulty target (usually adaptive based on your hashrate) and counts every nonce that meets that target as a share.
With 1.2 TH/s on a pool of ~50 PH/s, you’re contributing ~0.0024% of the pool’s hashrate. The pool finds a block roughly every 50 hours, so over a month you’d see roughly 14-15 block rewards distributed, and your slice of each works out to ~$0.40. Times 15 blocks = about $6 per month at current BTC price (~$95k) and difficulty.
Numbers shift with BTC price, difficulty, pool size, and how lucky the pool gets that month. Expect 20-30% month-to-month variance even on a “stable” pool.
Solo mining points your hashrate at a pool that doesn’t share rewards. If the pool finds a block, only the miner who submitted the winning share gets paid — the full 3.125 BTC, minus the pool’s fee (usually 2%). If you don’t find the winning share, you get nothing.
The catch: “solo” mining services like solo.ckpool.org pool your hashrate with other solo miners purely for routing and verification. They don’t share block rewards. So you and 4,000 other 1.2 TH/s Bitaxes are collectively searching, but only the one that submits the winning nonce wins. Everyone else gets zero.
It’s not bad design, it’s just lottery economics. The expected value over millions of years is the same as a pool. The variance is enormous.
Bitcoin’s network hashrate sits around 750 EH/s as of April 2026. Your share of that:
1.2 TH/s / 750 EH/s = 1.6 × 10⁻⁹
There are ~144 blocks mined per day. Your expected blocks per day:
144 × 1.6e-9 = 2.3 × 10⁻⁷ blocks/day
Inverted, that’s one block every ~4.3 million days, or ~11,800 years. The block reward is 3.125 BTC, worth ~$296,875 at current price. So your expected daily revenue:
2.3e-7 × 3.125 BTC × $95k = $0.07/day = ~$2.13/month
That’s the math. A pool earns you ~$6/month with low variance. Solo earns you ~$2/month in expected value with infinite variance — almost always $0, very rarely a quarter of a million dollars.
Pool math is better. That’s not the point of solo mining.
People mine solo for three reasons:
1. Lottery for fun. A Bitaxe is cheap. Running one on solo costs the same electricity as running it on a pool. The dollar EV is lower, but the dream is non-zero. Some Bitaxe owners have hit solo blocks — there’s a public archive on solo.ckpool.org of every solo-pool block found and which miner found it. It happens.
2. Ideology. Solo mining is closer to Bitcoin’s original mining model. No pool operator, no PPLNS curve, no centralization risk. If you care about that, the EV gap is a small price to pay.
3. Tax optimization (sometimes). A few small payouts per month is taxable income each time. A single ~$295k payout is one taxable event. Depending on jurisdiction, the difference matters. Talk to an accountant about that, not me.
For most fleet owners running multiple Bitaxes, the play is to pool the majority and run one as a solo lottery. Bitaxe Baller’s per-device pool config makes that a 10-second setup — gamma-01 to gamma-04 on a pool, gamma-05 on solo.ckpool. Track them separately, watch the dashboard.
Public-Pool (PPLNS, 0% fee, popular with Bitaxe owners):
public-pool.io21496.<worker> (e.g., bc1q...xyz.gamma1)xCKPool (PPLNS, 1% fee, longer history):
stratum.ckpool.org3333xSolo CKPool (solo lottery, 2% fee):
solo.ckpool.org3333xFor all three, paste hostname without stratum+tcp:// — AxeOS adds the prefix. The OLED’s “Best Difficulty” counter starts climbing within 30 seconds if the connection is good. If it doesn’t, you’ve got a separate problem — usually firewall, occasionally a typo in the worker suffix.
A pool gives you a predictable $5–6 month. You’ll see day-to-day variance — some days $0.15, some days $0.25, occasionally $0.50 when the pool hits a lucky run of blocks. Over a year, the pool number compounds steadily.
Solo gives you $0 most months. The math says you’ll find a block every ~11,800 years, but that’s the average — the actual outcome is random. You could find one tomorrow. You will more likely never find one in your lifetime. There’s no “running average” with solo — you don’t earn 0.0001 BTC and have it round up. You earn 0, then maybe 3.125, then 0 again.
If watching numbers go up matters to you, pool. If buying a lottery ticket and waving at it from time to time matters to you, solo.
If you’ve got one Bitaxe and you’re new, point it at Public-Pool and watch the share count climb for a week. You’ll see consistent payouts and you’ll learn to read the dashboard.
If you’ve got three or more, pool the older ones and solo the newest. Track them as separate workers (.gamma1, .gamma2, etc.) so the pool dashboard lets you see which device is contributing what. If the solo one ever lights up, you’ll know exactly which board it was.
Neither choice is wrong. The choice is whether you want a paycheck or a lottery ticket, and there’s no shame in either.
Try it yourself: Bitaxe Baller is a free Mac app that surfaces these recommendations automatically across your fleet — live monitoring, tuning suggestions, pool config, all in a native window. Open source on GitHub.