Solo Mining Odds
Every solo miner eventually asks the same question: what are my actual chances? Not the folklore, not the hype — the number. The honest answer is that your odds are a simple function of two things: how many hashes you compute, and which chain you aim them at. The first is limited by your hardware budget. The second is a free choice, and it moves your odds by five orders of magnitude. Here is the whole picture, in one table and plain math.
Your odds of solo mining a block are governed by one ratio: the hashes you compute versus the network difficulty of the chain you aim them at. Nothing else enters the equation — not the pool, not the time of day, not how long you’ve been trying. At July 2026 difficulties, that ratio says a 1 TH/s Bitaxe averages one Bitcoin block every ~15,000 years — and one BCH2 block every ~30 days. Same machine, same watts. The entire strategy of solo mining lives inside that gap.
Key takeaways
- The formula is one line. Mean time to block = difficulty × 232 ÷ your hashrate. Everything in this article — and in our live calculator — is that line applied to real numbers.
- Chain choice moves your odds more than hardware ever can. Upgrading a Bitaxe to an S21+ buys you a ~200× improvement. Switching the same Bitaxe from BTC to BCH2 buys ~180,000×. The most powerful knob in solo mining is free.
- Averages are not schedules. Block finding is memoryless: a 30-day mean says nothing about which 30 days. Half of all blocks arrive earlier than the mean, and dry spells several times longer than the mean are normal, not broken.
- Nothing else changes the physics. Vardiff settings, firmware tweaks, pool size, lucky hours — none of it moves your probability by a single hash. Uptime does, because a miner that is off computes nothing.
- The odds are honest — that’s the appeal. Solo mining is the rare lottery where the odds are computable to the decimal from public data, and where the “ticket” also proves the security of the network it plays on.
The one-line formula
Every SHA-256 chain sets a difficulty: how rare a hash must be to count as a block. On average, finding one takes difficulty × 2^32 hashes. Your hardware computes a fixed number of hashes per second. Divide the two and you have your expected time to a block:
mean time to block (seconds) = difficulty × 2^32 ÷ hashrate (H/s)That’s the entire science. A worked example: BCH2’s difficulty in early July 2026 is about 731 million. Multiply by 232 and you get ~3.1 × 1018 hashes per block on average. A Bitaxe Gamma computes 1.2 × 1012 hashes each second — so ~2.6 million seconds, almost exactly 30 days. No simulation, no secret sauce: arithmetic.
The table: every hardware class, all five chains
Mean time to one block, at difficulties measured on our own nodes in early July 2026. Difficulty moves constantly — treat this as a snapshot and the calculator as the live truth.
| Hardware (hashrate) | BTC | BCH | BC2 | XEC | BCH2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bitaxe (~1.2 TH/s) | ~15,200 yr | ~58 yr | ~2 yr | ~264 d | ~30 d |
| NerdQAxe++ (~4.8 TH/s) | ~3,800 yr | ~14 yr | ~182 d | ~66 d | ~7.6 d |
| 10 TH/s class | ~1,900 yr | ~7 yr | ~91 d | ~33 d | ~3.8 d |
| Antminer S19 (~100 TH/s) | ~182 yr | ~253 d | ~8.7 d | ~3.2 d | ~9 h |
| Antminer S21+ (~235 TH/s) | ~78 yr | ~108 d | ~3.7 d | ~1.3 d | ~4 h |
| Small farm (1 PH/s) | ~18 yr | ~25 d | ~21 h | ~8 h | under 1 h |
| Rental burst (10 PH/s) | ~1.8 yr | ~2.5 d | ~2 h | under 1 h | minutes |
The same grid as daily probability — the chance that today is the day:
| Hardware | BTC | BCH | BC2 | XEC | BCH2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bitaxe | 1 in 5.5M | 1 in 21,000 | 0.14% | 0.38% | 3.3% |
| NerdQAxe++ | 1 in 1.4M | 1 in 5,300 | 0.55% | 1.5% | 12% |
| 10 TH/s class | 1 in 693,000 | 1 in 2,600 | 1.1% | 3.0% | 23% |
| S19 (100 TH/s) | 1 in 66,500 | 0.39% | 11% | 27% | 94% |
| S21+ (235 TH/s) | 1 in 28,300 | 0.93% | 24% | 52% | >99% |
| 1 PH/s | 1 in 6,700 | 3.9% | 68% | 96% | ~100% |
| 10 PH/s | 0.15% | 33% | ~100% | ~100% | ~100% |
A note on BC2: as of July 2026 the BC2 chain is in a difficulty overhang — difficulty implies far more hashrate than is currently pointed at the chain, so realized network block times are stretched until the next retarget. The per-miner math above still holds (your odds depend on difficulty, which is what the formula uses), but BC2’s difficulty is unusually volatile; see the BC2 difficulty window explained for why that cuts both ways.
How to read those numbers without fooling yourself
A 30-day mean does not mean a block arrives on day 30. Block finding follows an exponential distribution: about 63% of blocks arrive before the mean, half arrive before ~69% of the mean — and a stubborn tail arrives much, much later. Waiting twice the mean with nothing to show happens to roughly one miner in seven; three times the mean, one in twenty. None of them is unlucky in any way the universe records — the process simply has no memory. Every hash is a fresh draw, and yesterday’s near-miss (however spectacular your best share looks) buys exactly nothing today.
This cuts both ways, and the pleasant direction is real: a meaningful fraction of wins land absurdly early. The documented history of small-hashrate victories — including a lone Bitaxe winning a full Bitcoin block — is variance doing what variance does, at scale, across thousands of miners. For the full mathematics, our Poisson variance guide goes as deep as you want.
Why the chain matters more than the hardware
All five chains SoloFury supports run the same SHA-256 proof of work — an S21 hash is equally valid everywhere. What differs is the difficulty, and the differences are not percentages; they are orders of magnitude. At July 2026 levels, BTC’s difficulty is roughly 180,000× BCH2’s. That single fact converts a Bitaxe from a millennia-scale curiosity into a machine with a realistic monthly shot.
The honest counterweight: smaller chains carry smaller block rewards, priced in smaller markets with their own liquidity realities. Solo mining a small chain is not a shortcut to Bitcoin wealth — it is a different bet, with radically better odds on a radically smaller prize. Which trade-off suits you is a strategy question, and it’s exactly the question our coin selection guide exists to answer.
What actually improves your odds — and what doesn’t
- Works: more hashrate. Odds scale linearly. Twice the terahash, twice the chance — no diminishing returns, ever.
- Works: a lower-difficulty chain. The biggest lever available, and it costs nothing.
- Works: uptime. A miner that is offline 10% of the time computes 10% fewer hashes. Boring, decisive.
- Doesn’t: vardiff, share difficulty, password flags. These tune how often your miner reports, not how it performs. Zero effect on block odds.
- Doesn’t: time of day, pool size, streaks. The network doesn’t sleep, other miners don’t dilute your independent draw, and luck has no memory.
- Marginal: overclocking. It raises hashrate, so it raises odds — linearly, at the cost of heat, noise and hardware stress. It never changes the kind of bet you’re making.
Who should solo mine — and who shouldn’t
Solo mining fits you if you can treat the hardware and electricity as the cost of a ticket you genuinely enjoy holding: a home miner heating a room while playing a real lottery, a hobbyist who likes the math being honest, or a larger operator deliberately taking variance in exchange for keeping the whole reward.
Solo mining does not fit you if you need predictable income, if a year without a payout would strain your finances, or if you would experience the (perfectly normal) long tail of bad variance as a personal failure. For steady small payouts, conventional pooled mining is the mathematically correct choice — no verdict from us will change that, and we’d rather tell you now than after a frustrating year.
If the odds in the table look like a bet you’d enjoy: check today’s live numbers, then point your miner at a chain in about five minutes. The math will be exactly as honest tomorrow as it is today.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the odds of solo mining a Bitcoin block?
For one hash, roughly 1 in 5.7 × 10²³ at current difficulty. In practice: a 1 TH/s Bitaxe averages one BTC block every ≈15,000 years (daily odds about 1 in 5.5 million); an Antminer S21+ at 235 TH/s averages one every ≈78 years (about 1 in 28,000 per day). Wins happen — solo miners found BTC blocks throughout 2024–2026 — but on Bitcoin they are lottery events, not schedules.
Can you solo mine with just 1 TH/s?
Yes — the question is which chain. On Bitcoin, 1 TH/s means a mean time to block measured in millennia. Point the same terahash at a low-difficulty SHA-256 chain and the math transforms: on BCH2 at July 2026 difficulty, a single Bitaxe averages a block roughly every 30 days. Same hardware, same electricity, five orders of magnitude difference — purely from chain choice.
How long would an Antminer S21+ take to solo mine a block?
At 235 TH/s and July 2026 difficulties: about 78 years on BTC, about 108 days on BCH, about 3.7 days on BC2, about 1.3 days on XEC, and a few hours on BCH2. These are means of a memoryless process — you can hit in the first hour or wait several multiples of the average. Difficulty moves constantly, so check the live calculator for today's figures.
Does the pool I choose change my solo odds?
No. Your probability of finding a block depends on your hashes versus the network difficulty — nothing else. A solo pool doesn't add luck; it provides the infrastructure (nodes, block templates, payout path). What does differ between pools: fees taken from a win, uptime, latency, and honesty of stats. Choose on those; the physics is identical everywhere.
Does pool size affect solo mining odds?
Not your odds of personally finding a block — in solo mode every miner competes independently, and a pool with thousands of miners gives you exactly the same personal probability as one where you mine alone. Pool size only affects how often you see someone win, which is psychology, not probability.
How do I calculate my own solo mining odds?
Mean time to block (in seconds) = network difficulty × 2³² ÷ your hashrate in H/s. Divide 86,400 by that number for your average blocks per day; for small values it's also your daily probability. Example: difficulty 731 million (BCH2), hashrate 1.2 TH/s → about 2.6 million seconds, or roughly 30 days per block. Our calculator runs this with live difficulty from our own nodes.
Are solo mining odds better on smaller SHA-256 chains?
Dramatically. The same SHA-256 work is valid on BTC, BCH, BC2, XEC and BCH2 — only the difficulty differs. At July 2026 levels, moving a Bitaxe from BTC to BCH2 shortens the mean time to block from ≈15,000 years to ≈30 days. The block reward is smaller and priced in a smaller market, but the probability transformation is real and is the core strategic decision in solo mining.
I've mined for years without a block — am I due for a win?
No, and this is the most important honest answer in mining. Hashing is memoryless: every hash is an independent draw, and accumulated bad luck creates zero credit toward future results. Your odds today depend only on today's hashrate and today's difficulty. The flip side is equally true — a fresh miner can win in its first hour without 'deserving' it.