solo mining means you try to find a block on your own. If you succeed, you keep the whole block reward: the subsidy plus the fees. You do not split it with a mining pool.
How it works
You point a miner at your own node, or at a service that still pays the full reward to whoever finds the block. The network does not treat solo work differently. A valid block is a valid block.
The wait (own calculation, 23 Oct 2026)
The network was about 1,070 EH/s of hashrate (mempool.space). One EH/s is a million TH/s, so a single home machine measured in hundreds of TH/s is a tiny slice. On average that machine would wait many decades for a block. That is why most miners join a pool: they trade a rare jackpot for a steady trickle.
Why people still do it
- They keep the whole reward if they do hit.
- No pool operator chooses the transactions, which is the same problem Stratum V2 tries to fix another way.
- A large farm finds blocks often enough for solo to be practical.
Practical note
Bitcoin could once be mined on a home CPU or GPU. That era ended when asics arrived. A laptop cannot usefully solo-mine Bitcoin today, and a small "lottery" miner almost never wins. Treat solo at home as a hobby, not a plan.
Not financial advice.