Choosing a Bitaxe mining pool: which pool suits your setup

After unboxing, the pool is the first real decision: it determines whether your Bitaxe plays for the entire block or collects satoshi-sized amounts, how much fee is taken if you hit, and how quickly you see anything in the dashboard at all. The good news: for a home miner there are exactly five pools worth considering – and one clear recommendation.

First the basic question: solo pool or regular pool?

A solo pool only pays when your miner finds a valid block – but then the entire block, currently 3.125 BTC plus transaction fees, straight to your address. In between there is nothing. A regular pool splits every block the whole pool finds among all participants: you receive tiny amounts continuously, which at 1–5 TH/s add up to a few cents a day and only reach the payout threshold after months.

For a Bitaxe the decision is therefore simpler than it sounds: the proportional amounts from a regular pool sit below your electricity cost, and the lottery ticket for the whole block is the real appeal of the device. How big that chance really is, our article Finding a block with a Bitaxe works out for every model. Our recommendation for any miner below 20 TH/s: solo.

Our recommendation: the OpenSourceMiners Pool

With pool.opensourceminers.de we run our own ckpool-based solo pool in Frankfurt. It is the result of two years of support for Bitaxe and Nerdaxe owners – and it fixes exactly the points that keep annoying people on the other pools:

• 0 % fee for solo mining. A found block goes entirely to your address via the coinbase transaction, with no account and no custody.
• Starting difficulty 1,000. A single Bitaxe Gamma submits its first shares within seconds. On pools with a high starting difficulty the dashboard sits at zero for minutes and beginners go looking for a fault that does not exist.
• Around 35 ms latency from Germany. The server is in Frankfurt, not in the US. Less latency means fewer stale shares.
• Public statistics without a login. Enter your address and see hash rate, workers and best difficulty – from your phone too.
• SOLO groups (1 %): if you want to play for a block together with friends, append #groupname to the worker name. When the group finds a block, the same coinbase transaction pays all members proportionally to the work they contributed.

The values for AxeOS:

Save, restart – within two minutes at most the pool status in the dashboard turns green and “Best Difficulty” starts climbing.

The five pools compared

All five work with every Bitaxe, Nerdaxe, NerdQaxe and NerdOctaxe. They differ in fee, payout, location and setup:

Public Pool is the pool preconfigured in AxeOS from the factory and the most widespread choice among Bitaxe owners worldwide. Technically equivalent – the difference to our pool is the location and the missing group feature. Solo CKPool is the classic with the longest block history but takes 2 % of a find; the US server solo.ckpool.org is the worse choice for Europe. OCEAN and Braiins are the two pools if you deliberately do not want a lottery but a steady trickle – with OCEAN, have it paid out via Lightning (BOLT12), otherwise a Gamma waits years for the on-chain threshold.

The three mistakes behind almost every support request

1. stratum+tcp:// in the host field. AxeOS wants only the hostname; the firmware adds the protocol itself. With the prefix the connection fails.
2. A Lightning or exchange address as the stratum user. A solo pool pays on-chain via the coinbase transaction. Enter an address whose keys you control yourself (hardware wallet or your own wallet), never a user@wallet Lightning address.
3. An empty password. The value does not matter, but some pools reject empty passwords. x is the convention.

If the miner is online but delivers no shares, the troubleshooter gets you to the cause in three clicks; the most common cases are also covered in Bitaxe connected to Wi-Fi but not mining.

Several miners on one address

Give every device its own worker name after the dot: bc1q….gamma1, bc1q….gamma2, bc1q….nerdqaxe. The pool lists them separately in its statistics, and a found block still goes to the same address. On our pool you can additionally combine the devices into a SOLO group – then the work of all workers counts together.

When your own node comes into play

A solo pool runs the Bitcoin node and the stratum server for you. If you want to run both yourself, install the “Public Pool” app on an Umbrel and enter umbrel.local:2018 in AxeOS. The block still goes entirely to you, just without depending on someone else’s server – in return you are responsible for node, storage and uptime. The full setup is described in Connecting a Bitaxe to your own Bitcoin node; whether a node is worth it for you is covered in Running your own Bitcoin node.

Conclusion

For a home miner there is no reason to pay a fee or wait months for a payout threshold. Solo pool, your own address, done: pool.opensourceminers.de, port 3333. If you would rather not type the values, the pool configurator assembles them for you – including worker name and a plausibility check of the address.