Your CPU is mining Bitcoin: what next?

📖Your CPU is mining: the short answer

If your PC, graphics card or NerdMiner is mining on a solo pool, it is making real attempts at a real block. But its chance is close to zero. At Bitcoin’s difficulty on 9 November 2026, a PC mining at about 22 MH/s, the average on Public Pool, has about a 1 in 920 million chance of finding a block in a year. A NerdMiner at 78 kH/s has about 1 in 260 billion a year. A Bitaxe Gamma raises that to about 1 in 16,800 a year on about 19 W, and a NerdQAxe++ to about 1 in 4,200 on about 76 W. An upgrade multiplies your chance tens of thousands of times or more. It is still a lottery.

Below: how fast each device mines and where the figures come from, the odds worked out step by step, what an upgrade changes and what it doesn’t, and how to get the most from the device you have now.

📖How fast each device mines

Hashrate is how many attempts a miner makes each second. The units go up in thousands: kH/s (thousand), MH/s (million), GH/s (billion) and TH/s (trillion).

Your own PC may be slower or faster than the average: SoloLuck’s Windows miner shows its real hashrate once it runs. In the same week’s median hour, Public Pool alone had about 400 cpuminer connections and about 1,850 NerdMiners, next to 17,305 Bitaxes.

Graphics cards don’t change the picture. The Bitcoin Wiki says GPU mining “has become impracticable” since ASICs arrived, that the hashrate of most GPU units is below 1 GH/s, and keeps its GPU table only “for historical interest”. A Bitaxe Gamma is built around one ASIC, the BM1370: a chip made only for Bitcoin’s SHA-256 hashing.

📖Your odds at today's difficulty

All four use Bitcoin’s difficulty on 9 November 2026: 148,364,561,003,867. Difficulty changes every 2,016 blocks, about every two weeks (Bitcoin developer guide), so for today’s figures and your own hashrate, use the odds calculator.

📖How the odds are worked out

Two steps, the same ones the odds calculator shows:

1. Average wait. A block takes, on average, difficulty × 2^32 attempts (2^32 is 4,294,967,296). Divide by your hashrate to get seconds. For a Bitaxe Gamma: 148,364,561,003,867 × 4,294,967,296 ÷ 1,200,000,000,000 = about 531 billion seconds, or about 16,800 years.
2. Chance in a year. 1 − e^(−one year ÷ average wait). For the Gamma: 1 − e^(−1 ÷ 16,827) = 0.0059%, about 1 in 16,800. When the chance is this small, it is close to one year divided by the average wait.

Each row in the table comes from the same two steps. For chances this small, ten times the hashrate means ten times the chance.

📖What an upgrade changes

• Your chance, in step with hashrate. A Bitaxe Gamma has about 55,000 times the hashrate of a 22 MH/s PC and about 15 million times that of a 78 kH/s NerdMiner. A NerdQAxe++ has four times a Gamma’s.
• Work per watt. A Gamma does its 1.2 TH/s on about 19 W. A desktop processor alone is rated at 65 W or more in AMD’s Ryzen 9000 range, for a hashrate measured in MH/s.
• What you can watch. On a typical day, a Gamma’s best share is around 35 million and a 22 MH/s PC’s around 640 (the method is in the best difficulty guide). Neither is near a block, which needs a share as hard as the network difficulty, about 148 trillion today.
• The port. On SoloLuck, a Bitaxe or NerdQAxe connects to port 3333. CPUs and NerdMiners stay on the Nano port, 3335 (/setup).

📖What an upgrade doesn't change

• It is still a lottery. About 1 in 16,800 a year means almost every Bitaxe Gamma will never find a block. Over ten years, a Gamma’s chance is about 0.06%.
• The pool can’t change your odds. Your chance depends only on your hashrate and the network’s difficulty, so it is the same on every pool. A pool decides the fee and how a found block is paid.
• The prize. A block pays 3.125 BTC plus the fees of the transactions in it. On SoloLuck, with a 0% pool fee, the whole block goes to the finder’s own address.
• Luck. The average wait is not a countdown. A block can come on the first day or never, and a long dry spell doesn’t make you due.

So upgrade if you want a bigger ticket in the draw and you accept the electricity it uses, not as a way to earn. Nothing on this page is financial advice.

📖Getting the most from what you have

• Use the Nano port. On SoloLuck, port 3335 has a minimum difficulty of 1, so even a slow device sends shares you can see (/setup).
• Keep the PC usable. SoloLuck’s Windows miner never uses more than 90% of the processor.
• Watch your best share. It shows the miner is working, even though a block is out of reach.
• Know what other pools advise. Solo CKPool’s FAQ says “CPU, GPU, and FPGA miners are never recommended for mining Bitcoin”, and that hashrates below 100 GH/s are not recommended because “it is unrealistic they will ever find a block” (solo.ckpool.org).

📖Choosing a next device

The hardware catalog lists home miners with their sourced hashrate and power, and the average wait and yearly chance each would give you at today’s difficulty. Places to start:

• Bitaxe family: from the one-chip Gamma, about 1.2 TH/s, to multi-chip models.
• NerdQAxe++: four BM1370 chips, about 4.8 TH/s.
• Can a Bitaxe find a block?: the odds coin by coin.
• The odds calculator, for any hashrate you are considering.

⛏️Ready to start solo mining?

Paste your address and copy the config from /setup, find your port and difficulty floor on /connect, watch the pool on /status, and check every claim on /verify. Mine to your own address — that is what makes it truly solo.

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