How to set up a solo mining pool and wallet for a rented miner

Solo mining means your miner works on blocks for your own wallet instead of sharing a pool payout. If your miner finds a block, the whole reward is yours; if it does not, you earn nothing. A WildWatts rental is the cheapest way to put real hashrate behind a solo ticket, and this guide gets a rented miner pointed at a solo pool in about ten minutes.

1. Choose the coin

Bitcoin rentals (Bitaxe Gamma, NerdQAxe++, NerdOctaxe, Avalon Mini 3, Avalon Q, NerdNos) mine SHA-256 coins. Bitcoin itself is the longest of long shots: a 90 TH/s Avalon Q has an expected time to a block measured in years. Bitcoin Cash, DigiByte (SHA-256) and eCash share the algorithm with far lower difficulty, so blocks come far more often. Customers renting from us have found a Bitcoin Cash block on an Avalon Q and a DigiByte block on a NerdQAxe++.

Dogecoin rentals (Hammer DC02, Hammer DC06, ElphaPex DG Home 1) mine Scrypt. Dogecoin and Litecoin are merge-mined on most Scrypt pools, so a block on either pays out.

2. Pick a solo pool

A solo pool runs the node and the block template for you; you connect with stratum and give it the wallet to pay. Well-known choices for SHA-256 coins are solo.ckpool.org for Bitcoin and SoloHash (solo.solohash.co.uk) for Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, DigiByte and eCash on separate ports. You can also point a Bitcoin rental at a solo server you run yourself, as long as it is reachable over the internet and speaks standard stratum.

Dogecoin rentals use our supported Scrypt pools: SoloHash's Scrypt port for solo Dogecoin and Litecoin, or unMineable if you would rather be paid in another coin.

3. Get the login format right

This is where most "zero shares" problems come from. Every pool documents a worker format and they differ:

• Wallet-only pools (ckpool, SoloHash): the worker is your wallet address, optionally with a dot and a name, for example bc1q…abc.rig1.
• Account pools (Braiins and similar): the worker is account.worker, not a wallet address. A bare address is refused.
• Address type: a few pools still reject bech32 (bc1…) addresses; use the format the pool's own page shows. Ethereum-style 0x addresses are never valid for a Bitcoin or Dogecoin miner.

WildWatts asks the pool to authorise your exact login before the change is pushed to the miner. If the pool says no you see the reason straight away instead of an idle session.

4. Deploy it from the dashboard

1. Open your miner in the dashboard and choose Pool settings.
2. Enter the stratum URL with port, for example stratum+tcp://solo.ckpool.org:3333.
3. Enter the worker (wallet or account.worker) and the password the pool asks for; most accept x.
4. Deploy. The miner picks the change up within a minute and the session log records it.

5. Check it is really mining

Hashrate on its own proves nothing: a miner can report full speed while a pool is refusing its work. The two numbers that matter are accepted shares, which must keep climbing, and best difficulty, which records the hardest share your miner has produced this session. On the pool side, your worker page should show the same shares arriving. If shares stop for more than a few minutes, WildWatts pauses your clock and restarts the miner; if the pool is the cause, fix the login and the clock resumes on its own.

6. Understand the odds

Expected time to a block is roughly difficulty × 2^32 ÷ hashrate seconds. Every share you send is a ticket; a block is a share that happened to meet the network target. Solo mining is a lottery with the odds printed on it, and a one-day session is one day of tickets. Pool mining, if you prefer it, pays small amounts steadily instead, and any rental here can be pointed at a normal pool just as easily.

What you need before you start

• A wallet address for the coin you are mining (the pool pays it, not WildWatts).
• The pool URL, port and worker format from the pool's own instructions.
• A WildWatts account. Free 24-hour sessions on the Hammer DC02 and NerdNos let you practise all of the above at no cost.