Solo: everything, or nothing.
Same node, same stratum, one port along. Find a block and the whole coinbase is yours minus the fee. Find nothing and you are paid nothing, for as long as that takes.
stratum+tcp://de.b2pool.io:3334
Worker and password work exactly as on the shared pool · also on hel.b2pool.io, ord.b2pool.io and hkg.b2pool.io
Work out your odds first
Solo mining is a lottery with honest odds. Enter your hashrate and the calculator gives you the average wait — not a promise, an average. Half of all finders wait longer.
Time to a block
Which one is for you
| Shared pool · TIDES | Solo | |
|---|---|---|
| Port | 3333 | 3334 |
| You are paid | For every block found while your work is in the window | Only for a block you found |
| Income | Small and steady | Nothing, then all of it |
| Fee | 1.0% | 1.0% |
| Payout source | The block’s coinbase, or a transaction from the pool | The coinbase of your block |
| Sensible for | One or a few machines | A farm, or a deliberate gamble |
With a single ASIC, shared mining is almost always the better choice. Solo makes sense when your hashrate is large enough that the average wait is measured in weeks rather than lifetimes — or when you would rather take the bet than the annuity.
How solo pays
A solo block pays you in its own coinbase. Your address is written into the block as one of its outputs, so the payment exists the moment the block does — the pool never receives it, never holds it and cannot withhold it. There is no balance, no threshold and no transfer to wait for. What there is instead is the maturity every coinbase on this chain carries before it can be spent: since block 973,440 that is 6,480 confirmations, about 45 days.
That is the whole difference. On the shared ports the block pays the pool and the pool divides it, which is why a balance and a payout threshold exist there at all. On solo there is nothing to divide.
- ASIC
- port 3334
- FPGA and GPU
- port 4445
- CPU
- port 5556
- Paid
- in the coinbase
Use a valid address as your worker name. On the solo ports an address the node cannot parse is refused outright, because a block found under it would have nobody to pay.
When solo is the wrong choice
Almost always, with one machine. Solo is not a strategy that pays less often for more; it is the same expected return with all the variance moved into one event. If the calculator says your average wait is measured in years, the honest reading is that you will probably never find a block — half of all finders wait longer than the average, and the average is already the whole story.
Solo is the right choice when you have enough hashrate that blocks arrive on a timescale you can live with, or when you want the whole coinbase and understand exactly what you are buying. For everything else the shared pool pays you for the work you actually did, whether or not the winning share was yours.