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No. There is no winning number waiting somewhere. There is only a rule, and anyone can check it in a second.

In a normal lottery, someone draws the winning number first, and everybody else tries to match it. Mining is different. Nobody has drawn anything. There is no list of winning numbers, not in the network and not in any computer.

Think of a safe that has no secret code. It has a test printed on it: when you type a number, the display must show a result that starts with eight zeros. Whatever number you type, the safe runs it through its recipe and shows a long result. Almost every time the result is junk. Once in a very long while it happens to start with eight zeros, and the safe opens. Nobody chose that number. Nobody knew it, not even the safe. The safe only knows the test.

That is mining. The test is the rule of the coin: the fingerprint must start with enough zeros, and how many is the difficulty. Every node has the same test, so every node agrees on what wins. And once a machine finds a number that passes, anyone can type it in and check it in a fraction of a second. Hard to find, instant to check.

Why such a strange test? Because the only way to pass it is to try billions of numbers, and trying costs electricity. A passed test is proof that real work was done. That proof is what stops anyone from rewriting old pages: they would have to redo the work for every page after it.

The first machine that finds a ticket that passes the rule. All the others move on to the next block.

When a machine finds a winning ticket, it announces it to the network. The other nodes check it, which takes a fraction of a second because checking is easy, and if it passes, the block is accepted and everybody moves on to the next one. All the other machines drop the old block and start working on the new one. Their tickets for the old block earn nothing. That is not unfair, it is the contest: only the first one counts.

Two machines can find a block at almost the same moment. Then the network keeps only one of them, and the other block is orphaned and pays nothing.

Mining is how a coin adds its next page of records, and how new coins are created.

Think of a coin as a notebook where every payment is written down. The notebook has pages, and each page is called a block. Thousands of computers keep a copy of the same notebook, so nobody can change the past.

Someone has to write each new page, and everybody has to agree on who. Mining is the contest for that. The winner writes the page and is paid with brand-new coins, called the block reward, plus the small fees people paid for their payments.

It scratches lottery tickets, trillions of them every second.

For every ticket, the machine takes the page being built and adds a number to it. It runs both through a fixed recipe that produces a long code, like a fingerprint. If the fingerprint is “lucky”, the ticket wins the block. If not, the machine adds a different number and tries again.

There is no trick for finding the lucky number, because the recipe cannot be run backwards. The only way is to try, and nobody knows in advance which number will work, not even the network. Each try is called a hash. On this page we simply call it a ticket.

Because it is so simple that nobody thinks of it: try, check, repeat.

Mining has no clever puzzle and no hidden maths to solve. The machine picks a number, checks it against a rule, and picks another one, billions of times. The rule is easy to check, and guessing is the only way. All the hard words around it (hash, nonce, difficulty) only describe this one loop.

A SHA-256 miner: a small Bitaxe, or a bigger ASIC.

The coins on LoneHash use the SHA-256 recipe, and machines built for exactly that recipe are the only ones that count. A normal computer, a laptop, a phone or a graphics card will find nothing worth mentioning, even if you leave it on for years.

A tiny hobby board such as a NerdMiner is more of a lottery ticket for fun than a way to earn. A Bitaxe is a small, quiet machine for a desk. A full ASIC is much faster, but it is loud, hot and hungry for electricity.

The idea is always the same. Only the obstacles in the machine’s way change.

Every Proof of Work coin does the same thing: the machine tries tickets until one passes the rule. What differs is the recipe. SHA-256 (Bitcoin and the coins on LoneHash) is so simple that a chip built for only that recipe, an ASIC, is millions of times faster than a normal processor. That is why a laptop finds nothing here.

Other coins chose recipes to stop that from happening. RandomX (Monero) is made for ordinary processors and a lot of memory, so an ASIC would gain very little. Some coins were built around graphics cards. A different machine, the same contest.

There is no mining at all. Coins are locked as a deposit, and the network picks who writes the next block.

Everything on this page is called Proof of Work: you prove you worked by spending electricity. Some coins use Proof of Stake instead. Nobody mines. Holders lock some of their coins as a guarantee, the network picks one of them by lot to write the next block, and anyone who cheats loses part of the locked coins.

Ethereum has worked this way since 2022 (before that it was mined with graphics cards). A Bitaxe cannot take part in it, and LoneHash has nothing to do with such coins.

How many tickets your machine scratches per second.

Hashrate is the speed of your machine. The units grow by a thousand each time:

A small Bitaxe makes around 1 TH/s, which is a trillion tickets every second. The whole network scratches far more than that. Your share of all the tickets in the world is your share of the luck.

How rare a lucky ticket is.

Imagine a lottery where 1 ticket in 100 wins. Now imagine one where only 1 ticket in a billion wins. Difficulty is that setting: it decides how many tickets are needed, on average, to find one winner.

When more machines join the coin, it makes winners rarer, so blocks do not suddenly come faster. When machines leave, it makes them more common. A high difficulty does not mean something is wrong. It only means many machines are playing.

Because a number with many zeros in front is a very small number, and small numbers are rare.

The real rule of the coin is a ceiling: the fingerprint, read as a number, must be smaller than a limit the network sets. The easiest way to see a small number is to count the zeros in front of it: 00a2… is far smaller than f5a2… So “start with eight zeros” is just a friendly way to say “be below the ceiling”.

Why not ask for a 3 at the start instead? Because it would change nothing. The recipe scrambles so well that every start is equally likely: a fingerprint begins with 3 about as often as with 0 (1 in 16 for each character). What makes a ticket rare is how low the ceiling is, and lowering it is exactly what difficulty does.

A share is an “almost lucky” ticket.

A winning ticket is so rare that a machine can scratch tickets for weeks and have nothing to show. The pool still needs to see that your machine is really working. So it also counts tickets that are lucky enough, but not lucky enough to win. Those are shares.

Think of a scratch card where three stars win. We also count the tickets with two stars. They win nothing, but they prove that you are really scratching, and how fast. Your machine sends shares all day long. They are the receipts of your work.

Because a block needs a much luckier ticket.

Every share has a score, called its difficulty. The higher the score, the luckier the ticket. A block needs a score as high as the network difficulty, and that is huge. Almost all shares score far below it.

Sometimes your machine gets a high score. The best one so far is shown as your Best share, and My Miners tells you how close it came to a block. If one day a share reaches the network difficulty, that share is a block.

Not in solo mining.

In pool mining, shares are what you get paid for. Here they are only receipts: they show that your machine is alive, they draw your hashrate chart and they feed the effort number. Only a block pays, and a block pays all of it.

Tickets that arrived too late, or were not valid.

Often a new block has just been found, and your machine was still scratching tickets for the old page. The pool cannot use those. A very small amount of rejected shares is normal. If your miner shows a lot of them, check its internet connection.

A counter: how many tickets you have scratched, compared with how many a winner usually needs.

100% means you have scratched as many tickets as it usually takes to find one block. 300% means three times as many. It looks like a progress bar, but it is not one. Nothing fills up. Every ticket has the same small chance, no matter what you scratched before. A machine at 300% is not “overdue”, and one at 20% is not “far away”.

It is like rolling a die and waiting for a six. On average you need six rolls, yet sometimes you roll twenty times without a six. This is how many people with a lot of work behind them still have no block:

So a high effort is not a sign that something is wrong. It is just the lottery.

No. Every ticket is a fresh start.

Coins have no memory. After a year without a block, your chance in the next block is exactly what it was on day one. Some people find a block on their first day, others wait much longer than the average. Both are normal.

Ticket for ticket, no. Every ticket has the same chance. The farm just has far more of them.

A ticket from a Bitaxe and a ticket from a farm are the same kind, with exactly the same chance of being the winner. The farm is not smarter and not luckier. It scratches millions of times more tickets, so it wins more often. Over a long time that is the whole difference.

Nothing builds up. A machine has no memory: ten million failed tickets do not make the next one more likely, and an “almost” lucky ticket does not bring you closer to a block. Every ticket starts from zero. So there is no number to find faster by being clever, and nothing to wait for. A block can come to you on the very first day, and it can come to the farm in the next minute. The only thing that moves your odds is the number of tickets, which is your hashrate.

Your share of all the tickets in the world.

If your machine scratches 1 of every 10,000 tickets on the network, you win about 1 of every 10,000 blocks. The calculator below does the sums with today’s numbers, and so does My Miners for your own hashrate.

A team: many miners join their machines and split the rewards.

Together they find blocks often. The pool shares each reward between its members, according to how many shares each one sent. Payments are small and frequent, for example every day.

In most pools the reward lands in the pool’s own wallet first. The pool keeps a balance for you and pays you later, after taking its fee. So the pool holds your coins for a while, and you trust it to pay.

The same way as at home: the pool gives every machine its own piece.

A pool has thousands of machines that belong to many people. For each one, the pool prepares the work a little differently, with its own small number written in (the ExtraNonce), so every machine scratches different tickets. Nobody repeats anybody.

The pool also has to know who did how much, so every machine sends shares and the pool counts them. That is how a pool divides a reward fairly: by shares. LoneHash does not share rewards, but it hands out the work the same way.

You play alone, and if you win, you win everything.

Your machine plays the lottery for itself. You may go a long time with nothing. But when a block is found, the whole reward is yours (minus the pool fee), not a small slice.

It is the difference between buying your own lottery ticket and joining an office syndicate that wins small prizes often.

Pools give small and steady. Solo gives rare and big.

Because we never want to hold anyone’s coins.

In a pool, all the rewards pass through the pool first, and the pool owes every member a share. Someone has to keep the balances, make the payouts and answer for other people’s money, and the members have to trust that someone. We decided not to be that someone.

With solo mining the block itself pays your address. There is no balance, no payout and nothing to withdraw. Nothing stays with us, not even for a second, and you can check it yourself on a public block explorer.

There is also an honest reason about size. Pooling evens out luck only when a lot of hashrate is together. A small pool would still be mostly luck, only with more paperwork.

You can earn nothing for a long time, and a coin can lose its value.

Solo mining can pay nothing for months or years. Coins can lose most of their value, and a small project can disappear. Mine only with what you can afford to lose, and count the electricity before you start.

Four things: where the firmware comes from, fake sellers, the power supply, and sites that promise too much.

Firmware. Install firmware only from the maker’s official page. A modified one can quietly send part of your hashrate to someone else’s address while your machine looks normal. If the hashrate on My Miners is clearly lower than your machine should make, find out why.

Fake hardware. Buy from the maker or from a seller you know. Very cheap “new” machines on marketplaces can have old chips, be badly built, or never arrive.

Power. A mining machine runs all day at full load. Use a proper power supply and a good cable, keep it ventilated, and do not leave it where heat builds up. A cheap charger and a thin cable are the most common cause of trouble.

Promises. Be careful with any site that promises a steady income or wants you to buy hashrate. Check that the pool you connect to writes your address into the blocks. For LoneHash, see How can I check it?

Anything about luck, and anything about money.

• We cannot promise that you will find a block.
• We cannot promise a profit, or that your electricity will be paid back.
• We cannot make your luck better. Only a faster machine does that, and it does it by a small, fixed amount.
• Being online all the time does not raise your odds. It only means your machine does not waste tickets.

We would rather tell you this now than let you find out later.

It depends on what you want.

Think of it as a lottery ticket paid with electricity. Most days nothing happens, and one day a block may arrive. If you want a steady small income, a big pool somewhere else suits you better, and we would rather tell you so. If you already run a machine for fun, like a Bitaxe on your desk, and you like the chance of a big win, solo is made for you.

Whatever you choose, count the electricity before you start.

Only in one place: the address written into the block your machine works on.

Your coins never pass through us, so we cannot lose them or run off with them. But when your machine works, it works on a block that we put together, and that block contains the list of who gets paid. If we wrote our own address there instead of yours, a block you found would pay us. That is the one thing we could do wrong.

It is also all that is at stake: the prize of a block you may never find. There is no balance, no deposit and none of your savings on LoneHash.

CKPool, open-source solo mining software that we did not write.

LoneHash does not use a pool program of its own invention. It runs CKPool in solo mode, open-source software written by Con Kolivas, the same author as the public solo pool at solo.ckpool.org. Its code is public, so anyone can read it. We compile our own build of it.

That is also why you do not have to trust our programming for the one thing that matters: any block you find can be checked on a block explorer (see How can I check it?).

Look at the block, when one is found. Nobody has to take our word for it.

1. Look at the block. When one of your machines finds a block, open it on a block explorer, a public website that shows every block of a coin. The first transaction of the block lists who was paid. For a block found through LoneHash you should see your address, and our fee as a second payment. Every block your workers found is listed on My Miners.

2. Ask someone who can read a block. A friend, a forum or a local group of Bitaxe owners can look at the same page with you. You do not have to share any key.

3. Start small. One machine first. The most you can lose is some electricity and the prize of a block, never a balance.

Two payments: one to you, a small one to us.

On a block explorer, the first transaction of a block is the reward. Its outputs are the payments. In a block found through LoneHash they look like this:

If you ever see a block where the big payment goes to an address that is not yours, that is the case to worry about. Tell us, and tell others.

What we will do tomorrow.

A block shows what we did that time. Nothing can force us to behave the same way later. What keeps us honest is that everything that matters is public and permanent: a block that paid the wrong address would be seen by everyone, forever, and looking at a block is free for anybody, at any time.

It also means this: someone without technical knowledge cannot check a pool alone, not here and not on any other solo pool. We would rather say so than hide it. So we do not call this “trustless”. We call it verifiable: nothing to withdraw, nothing held by us, and every block open to be checked.

Tell us, and tell others.

If a block ever shows something that does not look right, tell us and tell others. Do not keep mining until it is explained.

Your machine plays, we keep the score, and the block pays you.

If a ticket wins, the reward is paid to your address, inside the block. The pool fee is a second payment in the same block.

A computer that keeps its own copy of the notebook and checks every new page.

Nodes talk to each other all day. When a new block appears, each node checks it against the rules of the coin. If something is wrong, the block is thrown away. That is why nobody can cheat by writing a fake page.

Catching up with the notebook.

A node that starts for the first time, or comes back after being switched off, has missed pages. It has to download them all and check them one by one. That is syncing. For a young coin it takes minutes. For an old coin with a long history it can take hours or even days.

Until it has caught up, the node does not know which page is the newest, so it cannot give miners the right work. That is why LoneHash starts the pool of a coin only after its node is in sync. Once synced, the node just follows along, one block at a time.

To know the newest block at once, and to send a found block out fast.

Every second counts when two machines race for the same block. Our own node means we wait for nobody and do not have to trust anybody else’s view of the chain.

The newest page, and the page being built now.

Last block is the newest block that already exists. Working on is the block your machines are trying to win right now. It is normally the last block plus one. If it is not, the number turns orange, because the pool is a little out of step with the network.

It travels from your miner to the network in a second or two.

1. Your miner finds a ticket that is lucky enough to be a block.
2. The pool checks it and hands it to our node.
3. Our node checks it again and sends it to the network.
4. Other nodes check it and add it to their copy of the notebook.
5. The reward, written into the block, now belongs to your address. The pool fee is a second payment in the same block.

New blocks piled on top of yours.

Each new block makes your block harder to undo. After enough of them, the coins are considered safe and can be spent. How many a coin asks for depends on the coin. My Miners shows the count for every block your workers found.

Yes, but rarely.

Two machines can find a block at almost the same moment. The network keeps one and drops the other. The dropped one is called orphaned and pays nothing. It is nobody’s fault, it is part of the lottery. The block list on My Miners shows the status of each block.

The moment a block is found. There is nothing to withdraw.

The reward is part of the block, and the block pays your address directly. LoneHash holds nothing, so there is no balance and no withdrawal. The coins are on your own address, in your own wallet. Like any mined coins, they become spendable after the number of confirmations the coin requires.

Usually nothing for a long time, and then a whole block.

Solo mining pays in rare, big amounts. On average, your income over a long time is your share of the network, times the blocks that come, times the reward, minus our fee. In any single month the real result is far from that average: most months pay nothing. Use the calculator above for the average wait.

If you already run your own node and pool software, you do not need us.

For everybody else, LoneHash saves the work: a ready Stratum address that Bitaxe and ASIC machines understand (they cannot talk to a node directly), the difficulty adjusted to your machine, statistics for each of your machines, and email alerts. Nothing to install, update or keep running.

Keep the keys yourself, and never type them anywhere.

Use a wallet you control, a hardware wallet or a trusted wallet app. Write down the recovery words on paper and keep them offline. Never share them: not with us, not with anyone who writes to you, not on any website. LoneHash never asks for them.

We advise against mining straight to an exchange address. Exchanges can change deposit addresses, set minimum deposits and may not credit mined rewards, and then the coins can be lost. A wallet of your own has none of these problems.

If you think a miner was hacked, change its settings and look at your workers on My Miners. A hacked miner can only send its work somewhere else. It cannot touch the coins already in your wallet.

Open Connect and copy the settings.

On Connect you enter your wallet address and what you mine with, and it makes the exact settings for your device. Your address is your username, so there is nothing to sign up for.

A long code that tells the network where to send coins, like a bank account number.

You get it from a wallet app that you control. Only you hold the keys to it. Never share your seed phrase or private key with anyone. LoneHash never asks for them, and nobody honest does.

One of your machines.

Put a dot and a name after your address, for example youraddress.rig1, and the pool lists each machine separately. You choose the names.

No. The pool gives each machine its own piece of the work.

Every machine on the same address gets the same job from the pool, but with a small different number written into it, called an ExtraNonce. Change one letter of a ticket and the fingerprint comes out completely different, so no two machines ever scratch the same ticket, even though they all work for your one address.

The machines may well count the same numbers, 1, 2, 3 and so on. It does not matter: the number is only one part of the ticket, and the rest of it is different for every machine, so the same number gives a completely different fingerprint on each one.

You do not need to set anything. Put the same address on every machine, each with a different worker name.

No. Your address identifies your miners.

An account is optional. It can email you when a block is found or a miner goes offline, and it opens My Miners on your wallet by itself, so you do not have to type the address.

We do not hold them, so there is nothing to take.

When a block is found, the pool software writes your address into the block as the recipient. That is the one place where you trust us, and you can check it: look the block up on a block explorer, and the first transaction in it shows who was paid. Every block your workers found is also listed on My Miners.

Shares arrive at random moments.

The short numbers wobble because they are measured from shares, and shares come at random times. The 1-hour and 24-hour averages are steadier. This is normal.

It has not sent a share for 15 minutes.

Check that the miner is running and connected. A very slow miner can take a long time between shares. You can hide an offline worker from the list with its Hide button on My Miners. It comes back by itself when it sends a new share.

The old name stays in the list as offline.

Hide it with its Hide button on My Miners, or wait: with no share for 7 days it leaves the list on its own.

Nothing is lost, but your miner cannot win until we are back.

We hold none of your coins, so there is nothing to lose. Your miner reconnects by itself. The tickets scratched during the break are wasted, like tickets that were never entered in the draw.

The ones in the menu at the top of the page.