Mining Pools vs Solo Mining in 2026: How Bitcoin Miners Get Paid

The $200,000 question every home miner asks

In July 2026, someone plugged a $150 Bitaxe Gamma, a palm-sized open-source miner that draws less power than a desk lamp, into a wall socket, pointed it at a service called Public Pool, and about eight hours later solved Bitcoin block 957,382. The payout came to 3.1382 BTC (the 3.125 BTC block subsidy plus roughly 0.0132 BTC in transaction fees), worth around $200,000 at the time, crypto.news reported. The device was running at 995 gigahashes per second, less than a trillionth of the whole network, and CoinDesk reckoned that hardware that small should expect to find a block about once every 18,000 years.

Three weeks later, on 2 August, block 960,804 went to another solo miner, this one using Solo CKPool. Its operator, Con Kolivas, confirmed it was the pool’s 317th solo find, again worth roughly $200,000, according to news.bitcoin.com. Stories like these travel fast, and they plant a seductive idea: skip the pool and keep the entire block.

For almost everyone, the smarter play runs the other way. This article explains how Bitcoin miners actually get paid in 2026: why pools exist, the payout schemes that decide what reaches your wallet, what the fees really cost, who chooses the transactions inside your blocks, and the narrow cases where going solo is a calculated bet rather than a daydream.

Why pools exist: variance is the enemy

Start with the raw economics. The network produces one block roughly every ten minutes, about 144 a day. Whoever finds a block collects the 3.125 BTC subsidy (the figure set by the April 2024 halving and fixed until the next one, expected around 2028) plus that block’s transaction fees. With bitcoin trading near $77,000, per CoinGecko, the subsidy alone is worth close to $240,000.

The problem is that mining is a lottery rather than a wage. To find a block you have to be the first to produce a hash below the network’s target, and your chance on any single attempt equals your slice of total hashrate. In early September 2026 that total sat near 900 exahashes per second, or 900 million terahashes, according to Hashrate Index. One modern machine is a rounding error against that number, so a solo miner can run for years, pay every electricity bill, and receive nothing at all.

Pooling fixes this. Thousands of miners aim their hardware at a single coordinator and grind on the same block. When any member finds it, the reward is divided according to how much work each one contributed, measured in units called shares. Rather than a near-zero shot at a jackpot, every participant earns a steady stream proportional to their hashrate. The long-run expected value is almost identical; the volatility collapses. For a business that owes the power company money each month, that predictability is not a luxury, it is survival.

This is the same instinct that makes staking pools attractive on proof-of-stake chains, and the reason index funds exist in traditional markets: individuals trade a sliver of edge for a large reduction in risk. The mechanism differs, but the logic is identical, smoothing a lumpy income into something you can plan around.

The odds, laid out

Numbers make the lottery vivid. Independent mining site Million Miner models the chance of a single device finding a block at a network rate of about 950 EH/s, its August 2026 assumption. The results are sobering.

A Bitaxe expects one block roughly every 15,000 years, though as Million Miner drily observes, its daily odds are still around 53 times better than a single Powerball ticket. Even a rack of the newest Antminer S21 XP units, at 270 terahashes apiece, faces a wait measured in decades. The July winner beat those odds, and so did the August winner, because someone, somewhere, always does: with hundreds of thousands of small rigs running, the network throws off a handful of improbable solo blocks every year. That is a fact about the crowd, not a forecast for your machine.

Inside a pool: shares, templates and the coinbase

To see where payout schemes come from, it helps to watch a pool work. The coordinator assembles a candidate block, a template listing which transactions to include, and hands out jobs to its miners through a messaging protocol called Stratum, first introduced in 2012. Each miner hashes away and periodically submits a share, a solution that clears an easy, pool-set target rather than the much harder network target. Shares are proof that a miner is genuinely working, and the pool tallies them to measure each member’s contribution.

How hard a share has to be is itself tuned. Pools use variable difficulty, or vardiff, raising the share target for powerful miners and lowering it for small ones so that everyone submits shares at a manageable, roughly steady rate. That is how a Bitaxe and a warehouse of S21s can share one pool without either drowning it in traffic or starving it of data: each proves its work at a difficulty scaled to its size, and the pool credits them in proportion. The shares are otherwise throwaway; only the rare one that also clears the network target is worth anything by itself.

Occasionally a share also happens to clear the real network target. That share is the block. The pool broadcasts it, and the block’s coinbase transaction, the special first entry that mints new bitcoin, delivers the reward. In a normal pool that coinbase pays the operator, who then distributes to members. In a solo service it pays the finder directly. Almost everything about who bears risk and who takes a cut flows from this one design choice: does the reward land with the operator first, or with the miner?

Pooling is nearly as old as Bitcoin mining. The first pool, Slush Pool, launched in November 2010, founded by Marek Palatinus (known as Slush). It was renamed Braiins Pool in 2022, and its parent company now builds open-source mining firmware and champions the newer Stratum V2 protocol discussed below. For most of the fifteen years since, the argument has not been whether to pool, but on what terms.

How miners get paid: PPS, FPPS, PPS+, PPLNS and solo

Pools compete largely on how they translate your shares into bitcoin. A handful of standard schemes dominate, and the difference between them is essentially who absorbs the bad-luck streaks.

Pay Per Share (PPS) is the simplest: the pool pays a fixed amount for every valid share, guaranteeing income no matter when the next block arrives. The operator swallows all the variance, so PPS carries the highest fee and historically paid only the subsidy, not transaction fees. Full Pay Per Share (FPPS) extends this by also paying miners an averaged slice of transaction fees, and it has become the default for large industrial farms precisely because it turns mining into something close to a fixed hourly wage.

To make it concrete, picture a single Antminer S21 running at about 200 terahashes. Against a 900 EH/s network that is a vanishingly small share, roughly one part in 4.5 million, so on an FPPS pool the machine earns about that fraction of every block the network finds, paid out smoothly whether or not the pool itself gets lucky on any given day. At today’s difficulty and price that works out to a handful of dollars in gross revenue a day, before electricity. The amount drifts with price, difficulty and fees, but the shape is the point: small and steady, rather than a whole-block jackpot that, mined solo, would statistically never arrive. Scale it across a fleet and you can model a business; run it as a solo gamble and you have a coin flip that lands about once a lifetime.

PPS+ splits the difference, paying a steady per-share rate on the subsidy while distributing transaction fees only from the blocks the pool actually finds. Pay Per Last N Shares (PPLNS) pushes the risk onto miners: it pays nothing until the pool finds a block, then splits the reward among whoever contributed to the most recent window of shares. Payouts are lumpy and can be zero on an unlucky day, but fees are the lowest, and because the scheme rewards recent loyalty it discourages pool-hopping.

Ocean’s TIDES is a transparent, non-custodial cousin of PPLNS that pays miners directly from the coinbase, so no operator ever holds your coins. Solo, offered by services like Solo CKPool and Public Pool, is the purest form: find a block and keep almost all of it, find nothing and earn nothing. The variance is total. For the vast majority of miners the honest recommendation is FPPS or a well-run PPLNS pool; solo is a lottery ticket you buy with electricity.

Fees, thresholds and the fine print

Headline fees are only part of the cost. The table below collects the advertised schemes and fees for the major pools, drawn from D-Central’s 2026 pool comparison.

A few things jump out. Foundry USA, the largest pool, lists a 0% fee, a loss leader it can afford because its parent, Digital Currency Group, monetizes the relationship in other ways, and because scale makes even razor-thin margins profitable. Most FPPS pools cluster between 2% and 4%. PPLNS options are usually cheaper than FPPS at the same pool, because miners rather than the operator carry the variance, so the operator needs no capital buffer.

Watch the details underneath the percentage. Minimum payout thresholds (commonly around 0.001 BTC, and roughly ten times higher at Ocean) decide how often you actually get paid and whether small rigs leave dust stranded. FPPS pools quietly profit when real-world transaction fees run below the average they pay out, and lose when fees spike, which is one reason a fee-heavy block stuffed with Ordinals inscriptions or Runes tokens changes the math. Custodial pools also hold your bitcoin between payouts, a counterparty risk that non-custodial designs like TIDES are built to remove. On a small operation, a two-point fee difference matters far less than a pool that pays reliably and does not fold with your coins inside it.

The leaderboard: who runs the pools

Choice in practice is narrower than the list of schemes suggests, because hashrate is heavily concentrated. Here is the live picture from Hashrate Index in early September 2026, with the network near 927 EH/s.

Foundry USA and AntPool together approach 45% of all blocks, and it takes only three pools, Foundry, AntPool and F2Pool, to cross a majority, close to 60% combined. In the language miners use, the network’s Nakamoto coefficient for pools is three: the smallest number of actors who could, in theory, collude to control block production. That concentration is the through-line of HOGE Wire’s earlier coverage of who controls the hashrate, and it is why the protocol-level fixes later in this piece matter. MARA Pool, run by the Nasdaq-listed miner formerly called Marathon, is a reminder that several of these pools are arms of public companies with their own agendas; we weighed two of the biggest in Marathon vs Riot.

For an individual miner, concentration cuts two ways. The giant FPPS pools offer the smoothest income and the deepest reserves, which is why they dominate. But every hash you send to a top-two pool nudges the network a little closer to the majority threshold, which is the quiet argument for spreading hashrate to smaller pools like Braiins, Luxor or Ocean, even at a slightly higher fee.

The trust a pool asks for

Every custodial pool asks for a measure of trust, and it is worth naming exactly what you are trusting. On FPPS you cannot independently verify the pool’s luck; you take it on faith that the operator pays you the correct share of the blocks it genuinely finds, and that it holds enough reserve to keep paying through a long dry spell. Between payouts the pool also custodies your bitcoin, so an operator hack, an exit scam or plain insolvency can erase days of unpaid earnings. Transparent, non-custodial schemes like Ocean’s TIDES exist precisely to shrink that surface, paying straight from the coinbase so there is nothing for an operator to lose or freeze.

The risk runs in the other direction too. In a block-withholding attack, a hostile miner submits ordinary shares to collect payouts but quietly discards any share that would actually win a block, bleeding the pool’s revenue at little cost to itself. Selfish-mining and related strategies have been studied for a decade and are one reason big pools guard their Stratum infrastructure closely. More mundanely, a pool that goes offline is pure lost income for its miners, which is why serious operations configure backup pools and automatic failover in their mining software rather than trusting a single endpoint.

There is a systemic version of the same worry. Because the three largest pools together approach 60% of blocks, the network is trusting a very small club not to coordinate, whether on censorship, on reorganizing recent blocks, or simply on failing at the same moment. Nothing suggests they intend to, and the incentive to keep Bitcoin credible is strong, but concentration turns a technical possibility into a standing question, and it is why the template-handing-back protocols described later in this piece draw such passionate support.

Solo mining’s quiet comeback

Against that backdrop, a small counter-movement has grown up around solo mining, and it is more cultural than commercial. The spark is cheap, open-source hardware. The Bitaxe, an open-design single-chip miner that costs around $150 and sips 15 to 20 watts, has spawned a family of hobbyist devices (the NerdQAxe, the Avalon Nano) sold as desktop curios. Pointed at a solo coordinator like Public Pool (0% fee) or Solo CKPool (2%), they turn a spare outlet into a daily lottery ticket.

The wins are rare but real, and rising. Solo miners found 24 blocks in the twelve months to July 2026, a 41% jump on the prior year, and 12 of those came in 2026 alone, crypto.news noted. The July Bitaxe block and the August Solo CKPool block were two of them. None of this dents the odds for any single miner, but it shows the base of tiny participants is growing fast enough that the network coughs up an improbable winner every couple of weeks.

A small ecosystem has grown up to feed the habit. Hobbyists swap tuning tips on forums and Discord servers, sites like D-Central keep public trackers of Bitaxe block wins, and open-source firmware lets tinkerers coax a few more hashes out of a single chip. The devices double as conversation pieces and tiny space heaters, and their sub-20-watt draw means a full year of playing the lottery costs pennies of electricity. That mix, cheap to run and genuinely fun to own, is what has turned solo mining from a purist’s gesture into a real consumer niche.

Why do it, given the math? Three reasons come up again and again. Sovereignty: a solo miner with a full node validates and builds blocks with no operator in the middle. Ideology: every solo block is one the big pools did not make, a small vote for decentralization. And the jackpot dream, the same impulse that sells lottery tickets, except this ticket also modestly hardens the network. For a hobbyist spending a few dollars a month on power, those can be reasons enough. For a business trying to make payroll, they are not.

Difficulty, price and your real odds in 2026

Two moving numbers set the backdrop for every miner’s decision this year: difficulty and price. Difficulty, the network’s self-adjusting knob that keeps blocks arriving every ten minutes, has fallen for much of 2026 as higher-cost machines switched off. A single adjustment on 14 June cut it more than 10%, from 138.96 trillion to 124.93 trillion, one of the largest drops of the year per Galaxy Research data, and it has hovered near 125 trillion since. Lower difficulty means fewer competitors per block, which nudges every miner’s odds very slightly upward.

Price sets the size of the prize. With bitcoin near $77,000, down about 39% from its October 2025 record of $126,080 on CoinGecko, a block subsidy is worth roughly $240,000 before fees. That is why the same 3.125 BTC that fetched about $200,000 for July’s solo winner would be worth more today, and why miners watch the price as closely as their machines. Whether bitcoin can push back toward six figures is the subject of our year-end outlook; for miners it is not a spectator question, since revenue scales directly with it.

Put the two together and the 2026 picture is a softer network and a lower price, which squeezes industrial margins but very marginally improves a solo miner’s lottery odds. Marginally is the operative word. Even after this year’s difficulty decline, a Bitaxe still expects a block on a timescale measured in millennia. The economics that make pooling sensible have not changed; they have merely shifted a rounding error in the miner’s favor.

Who really builds the block: Stratum V1, V2 and DATUM

There is a deeper reason pool choice matters, one that has nothing to do with fees. Under the original Stratum V1 protocol, the pool builds the block template and simply hands miners a job; the miner has no say over which transactions go in. In effect, whoever operates your pool decides what Bitcoin’s blocks contain, and the top four pools produce roughly 70% of all blocks, according to Spark research. That is a lot of editorial power concentrated in a few hands.

Stratum V2 is the fix the industry has rallied around. Beyond a faster, encrypted, binary connection (job delivery drops from around 228 milliseconds to under 3, and the link is no longer sent as plaintext), its key feature is Job Declaration: a miner running a full node builds its own template locally, and the pool only checks that the coinbase pays out correctly, unable to alter the transaction list. Momentum is real. In May 2026 seven pools representing about 75% of hashrate, including Foundry, AntPool and F2Pool, joined the Stratum V2 working group, and its reference-implementation team projects V2 will power 40% to 60% of the network by year end.

The milestone came on 25 June 2026, when the V2-native pool DMND and the miner GoMining produced block 955,318, the first block a miner had built end to end. “A miner just mined the first Stratum V2 block to power their own product end to end,” DMND chief executive Alejandro De La Torre said. GoMining’s Mark Zalan put the stakes plainly: “For years, mining pools have determined which transactions are included in Bitcoin blocks.”

Ocean reaches the same goal by a different road. Its DATUM system lets miners build templates on today’s V1 firmware without waiting for new hardware, an elegance-for-deployability trade; Ocean mined its first DATUM block back in September 2024. Ocean co-founder and Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr framed the payoff on X: instead of two blocks made by the same pool, he wrote, the network gets blocks made by two independent miners, exactly as if they were not using a pool at all. The reason any of this touches your wallet is that transaction fees, sometimes inflated by Runes and Ordinals activity, are a growing slice of the reward, and control over the template is control over who captures them.

Censorship and the transaction-selection fight

The template question is not academic. In late 2023, developer 0xB10C documented a cluster of blocks that pointedly omitted transactions from addresses on the US Treasury’s OFAC sanctions list, and traced most of them to F2Pool. Confronted, F2Pool co-founder Chun Wang acknowledged running a compliance filter, then disabled it after community backlash, saying it would stay off until the community reached a broader consensus, The Miner Mag reported.

F2Pool still commands close to 15% of the network, so the episode was a live demonstration of the risk baked into V1: a single operator, for legal or political reasons, can quietly filter what the rest of the network mines. It is also exactly the power that Stratum V2’s Job Declaration and Ocean’s DATUM are designed to defang, by moving template construction back to thousands of independent miners. When you pick a pool, you are not only choosing a fee schedule; you are choosing whose transaction policy your hashrate enforces.

This is why the decentralization crowd frames pool choice as a civic act. A miner on a template-building setup cannot be leaned on to censor, because the miner, not the operator, decides what goes in the block. For a home miner the individual impact is tiny, but the aggregate is the whole argument: censorship resistance is a property of the crowd, and the crowd is made of individual choices.

What the SEC says about mining pools

American miners spent years unsure whether joining a pool crossed a securities line. That question is now largely settled. In March 2025 the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance issued a staff statement clarifying that proof-of-work mining, including participation in a mining pool, is not a securities transaction; rewards flow from a miner’s own computational work, an administrative act, not from the entrepreneurial efforts of a third party, so it fails the Howey test, The Block reported.

A broader interpretive release in March 2026 extended that reasoning across mining, staking and related activities. “This is what regulatory agencies are supposed to do: draw clear lines in clear terms,” SEC Chairman Paul Atkins said in the accompanying announcement. For pooled miners the practical upshot is that the act of pooling is not itself a regulated security, though a custodial pool that holds your coins still raises ordinary counterparty and money-transmission questions, and sanctions enforcement runs through the Treasury, not the SEC. The wider 2026 rulemaking calendar that fills in the rest is laid out in our regulatory countdown.

None of this makes a custodial pool risk-free. Regulatory clarity about the activity is not the same as safety of your balance, which is why the non-custodial designs above appeal to miners who would rather never hand their coins to an operator in the first place.

How to choose a pool (or go solo)

Put the pieces together and the decision comes down to a short list of questions.

• How much hashrate do you run? Below a few petahashes, variance dominates and only a pool gives you a usable income. Solo stays a lottery until you control a meaningful slice of the network.
• How much variance can you stomach? Choose FPPS for a near-wage, PPLNS for lower fees and lumpier pay, solo only if you can treat the outlay as entertainment.
• What are the true costs? Weigh the headline fee, the payout scheme and the minimum payout threshold together, not the percentage alone.
• Custodial or not? If holding risk worries you, favor non-custodial payouts like Ocean’s TIDES, or a solo setup where the coinbase pays you directly.
• Do you care where your hashrate votes? Smaller pools and template-building protocols push against concentration and censorship; the giants offer smoother income.
• Can you run a full node? Job Declaration and DATUM only deliver their benefits if you build your own templates, which means running Bitcoin Core alongside your miner.

For the overwhelming majority, the answer is a reputable pool on FPPS or PPLNS, with a mild bias toward smaller or template-building operators if your values lean that way. Solo mining earns its place as a deliberate long shot: a Bitaxe on the shelf, a few dollars of power a month, and the knowledge that the ticket also, in its tiny way, makes Bitcoin harder to capture. The July and August winners prove the jackpot is real. The 15,000-year expectation proves why you should not count on being next.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it better to mine solo or join a mining pool?

For almost every miner, a pool is better. A single machine has a near-zero chance of finding a block, so solo mining can go years with no reward, while a pool converts your hashrate into steady, predictable income. Solo mining only makes sense as a low-cost lottery, or once you control a large enough share of the network to smooth your own variance.

What is the difference between FPPS and PPLNS?

Under FPPS (Full Pay Per Share) the pool pays a fixed rate for your work, including an averaged share of transaction fees, so the operator absorbs the bad-luck streaks and your income is steady, though fees are higher. Under PPLNS (Pay Per Last N Shares) you are paid only when the pool finds a block, split across recent contributors, so pay is lumpier but fees are lower and pool-hopping is discouraged.

Can you really mine Bitcoin with a Bitaxe?

Yes, but treat it as a lottery ticket, not an income. A $150 Bitaxe running about 1 terahash can and occasionally does find a whole block, as one did in July 2026 for roughly $200,000, yet the expected wait for a device that size runs to something like 15,000 to 18,000 years. People run them for the tiny jackpot chance and to support decentralization, not for reliable earnings.

Which Bitcoin mining pool has the lowest fees?

Among large pools, Foundry USA advertises a 0% FPPS fee, and Braiins offers 0% on its PPLNS option; for solo mining, Public Pool charges 0% while Solo CKPool charges 2%. Remember that a low fee paired with a scheme that shifts variance onto you, or a high minimum payout, can cost more in practice than a slightly higher fee on a pool that pays reliably.

Is joining a mining pool legal, and is it a security under SEC rules?

In the United States, the SEC’s staff clarified in March 2025 that proof-of-work mining, including mining-pool participation, is not a securities transaction, and a March 2026 release extended that view. Joining a pool is legal and not itself a regulated security, but a custodial pool that holds your coins still carries counterparty risk, and sanctions rules are enforced separately by the Treasury.

Yuki Tanaka is a mining and markets correspondent at HOGE Wire.