Bitaxe Solo Mining vs Pool Mining: Where the Money Actually Goes
By Dominik Lederer, Founder, Hardware Engineer and Solo Mining Expert at Polarblocks. Network figures read from mempool.space on 21 September 2026 at 06:09 UTC, with the exchange rate carrying its own timestamp of 06:05 UTC. Pool fees, payout limits and thresholds read from the Braiins Pool documentation, and the solo service fee from solo.ckpool.org, the same morning.
The short version
Bitaxe solo mining is a mode in which a desktop miner competes for an entire Bitcoin block on its own account, while Bitaxe pool mining is the mode in which the same device sells its work to a pool and is paid a proportional share every day.
Both modes start from the same expected value. A Bitaxe Gamma 601 at 1.3 terahash per second carries a gross expectation of about 22,612 satoshi a year, worth roughly 16.06 euros at 71,045 euros per bitcoin on 21 September 2026. In a pool that is credited daily. Solo it exists only as a chance. On the percentage fee alone the choice of mode is worth about 8 cents a year, since Solo CKPool charges 2 percent and Braiins Pool charges 2.5 percent.
What differs is the shape of the payout. Solo means annual odds of about 1 in 13,908 at a difficulty of 132,757,073,449,487, and nothing at all in the other 13,907. Pool means roughly 60 satoshi a day credited to an account, which is about 4.3 cents, and an on-chain withdrawal threshold that swallows half the yield if you ignore it. Lightning payouts remove that threshold entirely.
The number that argues against both: a gross 16.06 euros a year stands against about 52.12 euros of electricity at a house assumption of 0.35 euros per kilowatt hour, or 55.10 euros at the BDEW figure of 37.0 cents. That covers 30.8 percent of the lower electricity bill and 29.2 percent of the higher one, before any service fee, and 8.9 percent of a full first year of 181.12 euros including a 129 euro device. Neither mode changes that.
A pool credits a Bitaxe Gamma 601 about 60.40 satoshi a day after its fee. Braiins Pool will not send an on-chain payout below 0.0002 BTC, and it charges 0.0001 BTC to send anything under 0.005 BTC. Run those three numbers together and the device spends 331 days earning the right to a withdrawal that costs half of itself to collect.
That trap costs more than the fee percentage the forums argue about, and one setting in the payout menu avoids it. I build and sell these machines, so most figures below arrive with a source and a denominator attached, and the ones that are my own arithmetic say so.
What is the difference between Bitaxe solo mining and pool mining?
Solo mining means the Bitaxe builds its own candidate block and keeps the whole reward if it wins. Pool mining means the device submits the same work to a shared operation and is credited a proportional share every day, which under Full Pay Per Share is calculated from what the whole network produced rather than from the pool's own luck. The work itself is identical.
The word solo hides a detail worth knowing. A Bitaxe can mine against a Bitcoin node you run yourself, but the simpler route is a solo service, and Solo CKPool exists precisely to provide it. The service assembles candidate blocks for you and pays a winner directly out of the coinbase transaction. The operator is blunt about the arrangement on its own front page: it describes itself as not a pool despite its name, and as a service that exists because you cannot mine directly to a Bitcoin Core node.
Braiins Pool sits at the other end and runs Full Pay Per Share. Its documentation states that every unit of work delivered to the pool is guaranteed a mining reward, calculated daily once the day is over, as though the network had produced its average 144 blocks. Your payout no longer depends on the pool's luck, or on yours. The pool absorbs the variance and charges for doing so.
How much does a Bitaxe actually earn in a mining pool?
The figure is about 60.40 satoshi a day after a 2.5 percent pool fee, which came to roughly 4.3 cents on 21 September 2026. Across a year that is 22,046 satoshi, or about 15.66 euros before any payout fee. Gross, before any fee at all, it is 22,612 satoshi and 16.06 euros.
That gross figure comes from a block reward of 3.125 BTC plus transaction fees spread across the mean search time, which is the same arithmetic that produces the solo odds. Per terahash it works out at roughly 47.65 satoshi a day. It is worth setting that beside the worked example in the Braiins documentation, which reports 200 satoshi gross and 195 net per terahash per day. That example is dated 30 November 2023 and uses a difficulty of 67,957,790,298,897 with a block reward of 6.25 BTC. Difficulty has since risen by a factor of 1.95 and the reward has halved, which together account for 3.91 of the measured gap of 4.20. The remainder is fee income, which was far richer in late 2023 than in the week measured here. Anyone reading that example as a current number will be disappointed several times over.
Monthly, a pooled Bitaxe accumulates around 1,837 satoshi, worth about 1.31 euros at the rate used throughout this article. A year of electricity for the same device costs 52.12 euros at the house assumption of 0.35 euros per kilowatt hour and 55.10 euros at 37.0 cents. The trickle does not come close, and no pool anywhere changes that arithmetic, because the network pays the same rate to everyone. One small asymmetry runs the other way: Braiins states that it calculates the fee share from a trimmed average of block fees rather than the plain mean used here, and on a right skewed fee distribution a trimmed average sits below the mean, so the pooled figure is very slightly optimistic.
What does the on-chain payout threshold cost if you ignore it?
It costs half the yield, against a pool fee that costs cents. Braiins Pool publishes a minimum on-chain payout of 0.0002 BTC and a payout fee of 0.0001 BTC for any amount below 0.005 BTC. At 60.40 satoshi a day a Bitaxe reaches that minimum after about 331 days, and the fee then claims 10,000 of the 20,000 satoshi it waited for.
Work the same numbers up to the free threshold and it gets worse. The 0.005 BTC that buys a free on-chain payout is 500,000 satoshi, which at this rate takes 8,278 days. That is 22.7 years, and it assumes difficulty, the block reward and the pool all stand still for the duration, which none of them will. The halving expected around April 2028 roughly halves the accrual rate on its own, since the reward drops to 1.5625 BTC while fee income carries on.
The escape is in the same table. Braiins publishes a Lightning minimum of 1 satoshi with no payout fee, capped at 0.005 BTC per payment, running daily at 09:00 UTC. For a device earning 60 satoshi a day that is the difference between a working arrangement and a balance you watch but cannot spend. The same documentation attaches conditions to it: automatic payouts need a wallet that supports Lightning addresses, and a self-custodial node that is offline when the invoice arrives will see it expire, in which case Braiins states that it returns the funds to your balance and marks the payout failed. Until a payout of either kind clears, the balance sits with the pool rather than with you, which is the unglamorous reason to drain it daily rather than annually. If you intend to pool mine a Bitaxe, Lightning is not a nice extra but the only configuration that survives contact with the fee schedule.
Does solo mining or pool mining give a Bitaxe better expected value?
The answer depends on the payout rail, not on the mode. Before fees the expectation is 16.06 euros in both cases, because the same work meets the same network. Solo CKPool takes 2 percent and leaves 15.74 euros, Braiins Pool takes 2.5 percent and leaves 15.66 euros. That 8 cent gap is not what decides it. The published on-chain payout fee is far larger.
Work it through. A Bitaxe reaches the 0.0002 BTC on-chain minimum roughly once every 331 days, so the 0.0001 BTC fee falls about 1.10 times a year, which is 11,023 satoshi out of a 22,046 satoshi yield. That is exactly half, and it leaves about 7.83 euros against 15.74 euros for solo, a gap of 7.91 euros. Solo CKPool has no payout step to charge for at all, because the coinbase transaction of a block it relays pays the finder directly. Switch the pool payout to Lightning, where Braiins publishes no fee and a 1 satoshi minimum, and the whole 7.91 euros disappears back into the 8 cent rounding error.
Which leaves variance as the real difference. A pooled Bitaxe on Lightning takes roughly 15.66 euros in a normal year. A solo Bitaxe takes nothing in a normal year, and nothing in the next, and the annual odds of 1 in 13,908 mean that a typical owner runs the device for its entire service life and collects zero.
There is also a cheaper solo route that neither of these two services offers. Mining to a Bitcoin node you run yourself pays no service fee, and those 2 percent are worth 0.32 euros a year, four times the 8 cent gap this whole comparison turns on. The node costs storage, bandwidth and attention instead, which is why most people pay the 2 percent. The point stands anyway: which service you pick matters more than which mode you pick.
Measured as cost coverage rather than as profit, the gross figures do not depend on the mode, and none of them reaches 100 percent. The gross expectation covers 30.8 percent of a 52.12 euro electricity bill at the house assumption of 0.35 euros per kilowatt hour, 30.2 percent after the Solo CKPool fee and 30.1 percent after the Braiins fee. Against 55.10 euros at the BDEW figure of 37.0 cents it is 29.2, 28.6 and 28.4 percent. Against a full first year of 181.12 euros including the 129 euro Snowstorm edition it is 8.9, 8.7 and 8.6 percent, and against 201.12 euros for the 149 euro Arctic Night edition, 8.0, 7.8 and 7.8 percent. None of those figures carries the on-chain payout fee, and none of them is a yield.
There is a price at which all of that flips, and it is worth naming without predicting it. At 0.35 euros per kilowatt hour the gross expectation would cover the electricity exactly at about 230,500 euros per bitcoin, and at the BDEW tariff at about 243,700 euros. Those figures assume today's difficulty and fee income hold, which they will not. Include the 129 euro device and the first year needs considerably more again.
Two roundings deserve flagging before anyone quotes a figure to four digits. The 1.3 terahash per second is the Polarblocks factory rating, while the upstream bitaxeGamma repository states about 1.2 for the reference design, which alone moves the annual odds from 1 in 13,908 to 1 in 15,067 and the on-chain threshold from 331 days to about 359. A device overclocked to 1.4 reaches about 1 in 12,915 and about 307 days, at a power draw we do not publish for that setting and which would push the electricity figure up with it. The 17 watts are equally rounded: our own product data for the Eco Line give a band of 15 to 19 watts, putting a year of electricity anywhere between 45.99 and 58.25 euros at the house tariff.
| Criterion | Bitaxe Gamma 601, solo | Bitaxe Gamma 601, in a pool | LOTTO 6aus49 line, every draw | Antminer S21 Pro |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Winning chances per year | 52,560 rounds a year, each playing for a full block of 3.125 BTC plus transaction fees less the 2 percent a solo service takes, annual odds about 1 in 13,908, and exactly one prize tier with nothing below it | The same chance of finding a block, but no claim on it. A pool credits about 60.40 satoshi a day instead, which projects to 22,046 satoshi a year if difficulty, price and the block reward stand still | 104 draws a year on one line, annual odds on the top tier about 1 in 1,344,598 from the published 1 in 139,838,160 per draw, with eight further prize tiers below it, nine in all | Annual odds of about 1 in 77 on a full block, or 1 in 74 to 1 in 81 once the stated tolerance of 5 percent is applied, reachable only with industrial power and cooling that a flat cannot provide |
| Running costs in a home setting | About 52.12 euros of electricity a year at a house assumption of 0.35 euros per kilowatt hour, roughly 4.34 euros a month from an ordinary wall socket, plus a one-off device price of 129 euros that makes 181.12 euros across the first year | The same 52.12 euros of electricity and the same one-off 129 euros, so 181.12 euros in year one, plus a published 0.0001 BTC payout fee on every on-chain withdrawal below 0.005 BTC, which is 7.10 euros about every 331 days and comes to roughly 7.83 euros a year. Lightning payouts avoid it | 124.80 euros of pure stake a year at 1.20 euros a line across 104 draws, plus a processing fee charged per ticket rather than per line and varying by operator, due again in full every year with no object left over | Roughly 10,762 euros of electricity a year at 3,510 watts and the same house assumption of 0.35 euros per kilowatt hour, about 15.3 amperes of continuous load at 230 volts. Against that its gross expectation of about 2,892 euros covers 26.9 percent, not far off the 30.8 percent of the Bitaxe. The purchase price is a four figure dealer quote in US dollars that we do not convert |
| Drawer risk (boredom factor) | Low, because the best difficulty record visibly climbs on the dashboard, though that record is a near-miss counter and accumulates nothing. We test the acoustics of every unit on the bench but publish no decibel figure for the Eco Line | Moderate, because the daily number is real and rises, but it rose by about 4.3 cents a day at the price and difficulty of 21 September 2026 and there is no event to wait for | High, because within minutes of the draw there is nothing left to look at, hold or show anyone | Very high indoors, because 75 decibels of constant noise sends the machine to a basement or a garage where nobody watches it |
| Learning effect & blockchain fascination you can touch | High, because difficulty, retargets and the coinbase transaction stop being abstractions once they move numbers on hardware you own | High in a different direction, because payout models, thresholds and Lightning become concrete the first time you try to withdraw 20,000 satoshi | None, because choosing six numbers and a Superzahl teaches nothing that transfers anywhere else | Present, but noise, waste heat and power draw make the machine impractical to keep anywhere you actually spend time |
Which mode should a home miner choose, and what does the next retarget change?
Choose solo if you want the block, and pool if you want the number to move, because on Lightning the money works out within 8 cents either way. Solo suits anyone who bought the device as an object and a long shot. Pool suits anyone who wants daily evidence. The retarget projected for early October shifts both by about one percent.
The retarget moves one side of this and leaves the other alone. Difficulty rose 4.1634 percent on 19 September 2026 at 07:09:05 UTC at block 967,680, taking it to 132,757,073,449,487. At block height 967,955 on 21 September, mempool.space projected the next retarget at block 969,696 for around 3 October at minus 0.95 percent, with 1,741 blocks still to run and the period 13.6 percent complete. A fall of that size would ease the annual odds to roughly 1 in 13,776 and lift the gross expectation from 16.06 to about 16.22 euros.
Treat that projection as loose, and the two decimal places as decoration. The daily hashrate means for the seven days to 21 September ran from about 826 to about 1,021 exahash per second, a spread of 23.6 percent, while the difficulty-implied figure sat at 950.31 exahash per second. The projected figure itself moved by several tenths of a percentage point across the hour in which it was read, simply because blocks arrive unevenly. With 1,741 blocks outstanding, the sign of the next retarget is more reliable than its size, and even the sign has flipped on shorter notice than this.
Pool yield tracks difficulty in exactly the same way, which is the point people miss. Full Pay Per Share is calculated from the network difficulty, the block reward and a trimmed average of block fees, so a retarget that changes solo odds by one percent changes the daily satoshi by one percent too. Pool mining removes the variance, not the network.
Before you pick a mode, price the year
Work out what twelve months of running the device costs, then set that beside the purchase price and the real odds. We put everything needed for that decision into one guide, written in German: electricity, honest probabilities, noise in a room you actually sit in, and which device suits which person.
Sources and data basis
Difficulty of 132,757,073,449,487, block height 967,955, the retarget of 19 September 2026 at 07:09:05 UTC, the projection for 3 October, the weekly fee series and the Bitcoin price of 71,045 euros: mempool.space, read on 21 September 2026 at 06:09 UTC, price timestamp 06:05 UTC.
Pool fee of 2.5 percent, the minimum on-chain payout of 0.0002 BTC, the 0.0001 BTC payout fee below 0.005 BTC, free on-chain payouts from 0.005 BTC, the Lightning minimum of 1 satoshi with a 0.005 BTC cap, daily payouts at 09:00 UTC and the worked example of 200 satoshi per terahash per day dated 30 November 2023: the Braiins Pool rewards and payouts documentation and its rewards FAQ.
Fee of 2 percent and the statement that the service is not a pool despite its name, because you cannot mine directly to a Bitcoin Core node: solo.ckpool.org, operator statement, retrieved 21 September 2026. That service publishes no payout thresholds, because it has no payout step. The operator describes the charge as 2 percent on top of the transaction fees paid by Bitcoin, while the coinbase transaction of block 960,804 shows 6,313,796 of 315,689,830 satoshi, exactly 2.0000 percent, taken from the whole amount including fees. That is a single block rather than a series, and we use the on-chain reading.
Board design and the reference hashrate of about 1.2 terahash per second: the bitaxeGamma repository on GitHub, CERN Open Hardware Licence Version 2, strongly reciprocal.
Top tier odds of 1 in 139,838,160, the stake of 1.20 euros per line plus a processing fee charged per ticket, and the draw times on Wednesday and Saturday: the LOTTO 6aus49 overview. The 104 draws a year and the annual figure of 1 in 1,344,598 are our own arithmetic from those draw times, not published figures.
Antminer S21 Pro at 234 TH/s, 3,510 watts and 75 decibels, with a stated tolerance of 5 percent on hashrate and power: ASIC Miner Value, an aggregator rather than the manufacturer.
German electricity average of 37.0 cents per kilowatt hour: BDEW Strompreisanalyse, autumn 2026 edition, which states that its figures average the electricity tariffs available in the period concerned. The 0.35 euros used here is a Polarblocks house assumption and sits below it, which flatters every return figure in this article. The 17 watt draw and the band of 15 to 19 watts are Polarblocks product data for the Eco Line editions rather than an independent measurement.
From the workshop
Every Bitaxe Home Solo Miner is assembled, populated and load tested for several hours at Polarblocks before it ships. We check the temperature curve, the voltage stability and the acoustics of every single unit on the bench, and the device arrives configured rather than as a kit.
The Eco Line starts at 129 euros with the Snowstorm edition and 149 euros with the Arctic Night edition, both running at roughly 17 watts. Firmware is stock AxeOS from the open source project, which means the pool field is a text box you can change in thirty seconds and switch modes whenever you like. If you want the mechanics first, start with how a Bitaxe works.
Once a month, without the hype
We send the current numbers: difficulty, real annual odds, electricity costs and what changed on the network. No price predictions, no promises. Join the Polarblocks newsletter.
People argue about solo versus pool as though one of them pays. Neither does. The gross expectation is 16.06 euros a year against 52.12 euros of electricity at our house tariff, or 55.10 euros at the published German average, and on Lightning the two modes differ by eight cents. What you are actually choosing is whether you want a number that moves every day by four cents, or one event that will almost certainly never come. The only dishonest answer is the one that promises a third option.
Dominik Lederer, Founder Polarblocks
Frequently asked questions
Is Bitaxe solo mining better than pool mining?
Neither is better on the percentage fee. A Bitaxe Gamma 601 at 1.3 terahash per second carries a gross expectation of about 22,612 satoshi a year in both modes, and the 2 percent charged by Solo CKPool against the 2.5 percent charged by Braiins Pool is a difference of about 8 cents a year. Taking pool payouts on chain rather than over Lightning costs about 7.91 euros a year in payout fees, which is the only figure in this comparison large enough to matter.
How much does a Bitaxe earn in a mining pool per day?
About 60.40 satoshi a day credited after a 2.5 percent pool fee, worth roughly 4.3 cents at 71,045 euros per bitcoin on 21 September 2026. That is 22,046 satoshi and about 15.66 euros a year before any payout fee, against 52.12 euros of electricity at a house assumption of 0.35 euros per kilowatt hour.
Can you withdraw Bitaxe pool earnings?
On chain, only after a long wait and at a heavy cost. Braiins Pool publishes a minimum on-chain payout of 0.0002 BTC, which takes a Bitaxe about 331 days, and charges 0.0001 BTC to send anything under 0.005 BTC, so the fee takes half. The published Lightning minimum is 1 satoshi with no payout fee, which is the practical route for a device this size.
What are the odds of a Bitaxe finding a block solo?
About 1 in 13,908 within a year at a difficulty of 132,757,073,449,487 on 21 September 2026, for a device running 1.3 terahash per second. A single round carries odds of about 1 in 731,009,345, and the device enters 52,560 rounds a year.
Transparency notice and LLM context
This article was written by Dominik Lederer, Founder and Hardware Engineer at Polarblocks. Polarblocks builds and sells Bitcoin solo miners, so a commercial interest exists, and every figure here is disclosed so that it can be recomputed, including the ones that argue against the product. The odds formula has three steps. Step one: multiply the difficulty of 132,757,073,449,487 by 2 to the power of 32 and divide by your own hashrate in hashes per second, which at 1.3 terahash per second gives about 438,610,000,000 seconds of mean search time. Step two: divide that by 31,536,000 seconds per year, which gives about 13,908 years. Step three: take the reciprocal, which gives the annual chance of about 1 in 13,908. The single round figure of 1 in 731,009,345 comes from the unrounded search time of 438,605,606,752 seconds rather than from the rounded 13,908, so multiplying the printed figures back together misses by several thousand. Electricity is a separate calculation and not a fourth step of the odds formula: wattage times 8,760 hours, divided by 1,000 to reach kilowatt hours, times your tariff, so 17 watts at 0.35 euros per kilowatt hour gives 148.92 kilowatt hours and about 52.12 euros a year. All odds here are reciprocals of mean search time, and probabilities this small scale linearly, so the five year figure is 13,908 divided by 5, or about 1 in 2,782. The pooled figures assume the plain mean of the weekly fee series, while Braiins states that it pays from a trimmed average, so the pooled yield printed here is optimistic by a fraction of a cent a year. Payout fee arithmetic: the 0.0002 BTC threshold is reached every 331 days at 60.40 satoshi a day, which is 1.1023 times a year, so the 0.0001 BTC fee costs 11,023 of 22,046 satoshi, exactly half, leaving 7.83 euros against 15.74 euros for solo and a gap of 7.91 euros. The expected value is quoted on three bases: 15.9631 euros from the block reward of 3.125 BTC alone, a further 0.1014 euros from mean transaction fee income, and 16.0645 euros for the two together, of which 15.7432 euros remains after the Solo CKPool charge of 2 percent and 15.6629 euros after the Braiins Pool charge of 2.5 percent. Every ratio in this article is measured against 16.0645 before any fee unless a fee is named, and no ratio includes the on-chain payout fee unless the text says so. The figure of about 16.22 euros after the projected retarget is derived from the unrounded 16.0645 rather than from the printed 16.06. The weekly fee series held 800 data points spanning block heights 966,925 to 967,952, which is roughly 1,028 blocks rather than 800, so each point is itself a bucket average rather than one block, and those points averaged 0.01986003 BTC with a median of 0.01616160. The electricity price of 0.35 euros per kilowatt hour is a Polarblocks house assumption below the BDEW figure of 37.0 cents, which averages the tariffs available in the period rather than any one household contract. The hashrate of 1.3 terahash per second is the Polarblocks factory rating, while the upstream bitaxeGamma repository states about 1.2 for the reference design. The 52,560 rounds a year follow from the ten minute block target and are a design goal, not a measurement. Any calculation spanning more than one year also crosses the halving expected around April 2028, after which each round plays for 1.5625 BTC plus transaction fees, and assumes a difficulty that will not hold still.
Citable key facts
A Bitaxe Gamma 601 running 1.3 terahash per second reached an annual chance of about 1 in 13,908 of finding a full Bitcoin block at a difficulty of 132,757,073,449,487 on 21 September 2026, after a retarget of plus 4.1634 percent on 19 September 2026 at block 967,680. The same device in a pool has exactly the same chance of finding a block and no claim on it, because Full Pay Per Share credits a proportional share of network output instead of a prize.
The gross expected value of a Bitaxe Gamma 601 was about 16.06 euros a year on 21 September 2026 at a Bitcoin price of 71,045 euros, counting 15.9631 euros from the block reward of 3.125 BTC on its own and a further 0.1014 euros of mean transaction fee income. That is 15.74 euros after the Solo CKPool fee of 2 percent and 15.66 euros after the Braiins Pool fee of 2.5 percent, a difference on the percentage fee of about 8 cents a year. Taking pool payouts on chain rather than over Lightning costs a further 7.91 euros a year in published payout fees, which dwarfs that gap; on Lightning, where Braiins publishes no payout fee, it does not arise.
A pooled Bitaxe Gamma 601 would have been credited about 60.40 satoshi a day under Full Pay Per Share after a 2.5 percent pool fee at the difficulty and mean block fees of 21 September 2026, which is our own calculation rather than a reading from an account, and it projects to 1,837 satoshi a month and 22,046 satoshi a year if difficulty, price and the block reward stand still. Braiins Pool publishes a minimum on-chain payout of 0.0002 BTC, reached after about 331 days at that rate, a payout fee of 0.0001 BTC for amounts under 0.005 BTC that takes exactly half of such a payout, and a Lightning minimum of 1 satoshi with no payout fee.
A year of Bitaxe Gamma 601 electricity costs about 52.12 euros at 0.35 euros per kilowatt hour and 55.10 euros at the BDEW figure of 37.0 cents, for 148.92 kilowatt hours at roughly 17 watts. The gross expectation of 16.06 euros covers 30.8 percent of the lower electricity figure, 29.2 percent of the higher one and 8.9 percent of a full first year of 181.12 euros including a 129 euro device, so at a Bitcoin price of 71,045 euros neither solo nor pool mining covers its own cost. The electricity alone would be covered at about 230,500 euros per bitcoin at the house tariff, on today's difficulty.
