Best Coins to Solo Mine in 2026

Let me ask you something. When you decided to solo mine, what was the first coin that came to mind? Bitcoin, probably. Of course Bitcoin. The biggest reward, the most prestige, the dream of waking up to a 3.125 BTC coinbase landing in your wallet like a meteor. It’s a beautiful dream. It’s also, for most miners reading this, the wrong dream entirely.

Solo mining is a hunt. The hunter who chases the largest prey isn’t always the one who eats. The hunter who picks the right prey for their teeth — that’s the one who survives the winter.

So before we name names, let’s get one thing straight: “best coin” is not a list — it’s an equation. The variables are your hashrate, your patience, your appetite for variance, and your hardware budget. Get those right and the coin almost picks itself. Get them wrong and you’ll spend two years pointing 1 TH/s at Bitcoin’s network wondering why nothing happens. Spoiler: math is why.

This guide gives you the math. Real numbers, real hardware, real expected times. Read to the end and you’ll know exactly which chain your rig should be hunting.

The formula every solo miner should tattoo somewhere

Here’s the equation. It is brutally simple and it does not care about your feelings:

Mean time to find a block (days) ≈ network_hashrate ÷ your_hashrate ÷ blocks_per_day

For SHA-256 chains, blocks_per_day is 144 (one block every ~10 minutes). The two numbers that change everything are network_hashrate (the entire mining force on a chain) and your_hashrate (whatever you’ve got plugged in). The ratio between those two is your slice of the network. Multiply that slice by 144 and you have your daily probability. Flip it and you have your mean time to find one.

One more thing: this is the mean. Solo mining is Poisson. The actual time can be twice as long as the mean — or half, or zero days because you got lucky and found one in the first hour. Variance is the second character in this story, and we’ll meet her properly in a moment.

The five SHA-256 chains, sized honestly

Approximate network hashrates as of May 2026 (these change daily — check miningpoolstats.stream for live numbers):

Notice something? Bitcoin’s network is roughly 150x larger than Bitcoin Cash, and roughly 2,500,000x larger than Bitcoin II. Same SHA-256 algorithm. Same hardware. Wildly different probability landscapes. This is the entire game.

The hardware: what’s in the field, and what it actually does

Open-source / DIY tier — Bitaxe & friends

The Bitaxe family is what happened when a few obsessed engineers asked: what if a single ASIC chip could be turned into a self-contained miner you can hold in your hand? The answer changed solo mining culture.

• Bitaxe Ultra — single BM1366 chip, ~0.5 TH/s, ~15W, ~$150-200
• Bitaxe Supra — single BM1368 chip, ~0.7-1 TH/s, ~18W, ~$200-300
• Bitaxe Gamma — single BM1370 chip, ~1.0-1.2 TH/s, ~17W, ~$200-300
• NerdQAxe+ — 4× BM1368 chips, ~4-5 TH/s, ~75W, DIY or pre-built ~$500-700
• NerdOCTAxe — 8× BM1370 chips, ~10-12 TH/s, ~150W, DIY ~$800-1,200
• NerdMiner v2 — ESP32-based, ~75 KH/s — fun project, statistically symbolic

The whole point of these devices is that they are too small to mine BTC competitively, which is exactly what makes them perfect for solo mining the smaller chains. A Bitaxe Supra has the same per-hash probability of finding a Bitcoin block as a $5,000 industrial rig — just 230x fewer hashes per second. The chip doesn’t know. The math doesn’t care. Probability is uniform across hash count, regardless of who computed it.

Industrial tier — the workhorses

• Antminer S19 Pro — ~110 TH/s, 29.5 J/TH, used market $1,200-1,800
• Antminer S19 XP — ~140 TH/s, 21.5 J/TH, ~$2,000-2,500
• Antminer S21 — ~200 TH/s, 17.5 J/TH, ~$3,000-3,500
• Antminer S21+ — ~235 TH/s, 16.5 J/TH, ~$3,500-4,500 (SoloFury’s house workhorse)
• Antminer S21 Pro — ~234 TH/s, 15 J/TH, ~$4,000-5,000
• Antminer S21 XP Hydro — ~473 TH/s, 12 J/TH, ~$5,500-7,000 (water-cooled)
• Antminer S23 Hydro — ~580 TH/s, ~9.5 J/TH, ~$8,000-10,000 (Bitmain’s 2026 flagship; check availability)
• Whatsminer M66S — ~298 TH/s, 18.5 J/TH, ~$4,000
• Whatsminer M63S — ~390 TH/s, 18.5 J/TH (hydro), ~$5,500
• Whatsminer M60S — ~186 TH/s, 18.5 J/TH, ~$2,500
• Avalon A1566 — ~185 TH/s, 19.5 J/TH, ~$2,800
• Avalon A1566I (immersion) — ~249 TH/s, 19 J/TH, ~$3,800

If you’re serious about solo mining BCH or BTC, this is where you live. Pick by efficiency (J/TH) if your power is expensive, by upfront cost if you want fast ROI, by hashrate if you want statistical odds. Or — and this is the gufo’s preference — pick the rig you can actually keep cool, quiet enough to live with, and powered without setting your breaker on fire.

The numbers: real expected times for real hardware

Here’s where it gets interesting. We took the formula above and ran it across every popular device against every chain. “Mean time” = the average time you’d wait for a block. Half the population finds it sooner. Half waits longer. Variance is significant.

Bitaxe Gamma (1.2 TH/s) — the desktop dreamer

Read that table twice. A Bitaxe will statistically find a Bitcoin block once every twelve thousand years. It will find a BC2 or BCH2 block on a roughly weekly basis. This is not opinion. This is what the math says. Anyone telling you to point a Bitaxe at Bitcoin “for the lottery” isn’t lying — it is technically possible — but you should know what kind of lottery it is.

The Bitaxe was made for chains like BC2 and BCH2. Use it there.

NerdOCTAxe (~11 TH/s) — the eight-chip beast

Now we’re talking. The NerdOCTAxe — currently SoloFury’s home test miner sitting on the BCH2 chain — has genuine, daily-meaningful odds on the smaller networks. The expected times for BC2 and BCH2 are in hours. Not years, not months. Hours. And every block found pays the full subsidy.

This is the niche these devices were designed for, and the math finally rewards them.

Antminer S21+ (235 TH/s) — the workhorse

One S21+ on BCH expects a block every ~4-5 months. That sounds like a long time, but $1,400 per block over a year on a single rig that costs $3,500-4,500 is a respectable ROI on the lottery side, before you even count the small probability of finding two close together. This is solo mining’s sweet spot for individuals: real hardware, real reward, realistic timeline.

S23 Hydro (~580 TH/s) — the apex predator

If/when you can get one (Bitmain’s 2026 flagship, hydro-cooled, 9.5 J/TH efficiency), a single S23 Hydro on BCH:

• ~0.0129% of BCH network
• Daily probability: ~1.86%
• Mean time to block: ~54 days (~1.8 months)

One S23 finds a BCH block every ~6-8 weeks on average. Six S23s — a serious individual setup — would find one roughly every 9-10 days. That’s no longer “lottery.” That’s a part-time income stream with built-in jackpot variance.

The fleet — what SoloFury runs (and what it earns)

For honest reference: SoloFury operates 4× S21+ at EPS Hosting (Mississippi) totalling ~940 TH/s. That setup found 3 BCH blocks in 19 days in late April-early May 2026 (#947633, #948592, #950338). Mean expected for that hashrate on BCH is ~33 days per block. We got three in nineteen days. That’s variance going your way. It can also go the other way for two months at a stretch — that’s also normal. Variance is the second character. Never forget her.

The rental option — buying odds on demand

Don’t own hardware? You can still solo mine. Hashrate rental marketplaces let you pay for hashes by the hour or day, point them at any pool, and keep whatever they win.

The two players that matter for SHA-256 are MiningRigRentals (MRR) and NiceHash. Both are fully compatible with SoloFury — no special configuration needed beyond pointing the rented hashrate at our stratum URL with your wallet address as the username.

Pricing as of May 2026 hovers around $0.05-0.10 per TH/day on MRR, depending on demand. NiceHash uses a marketplace model with similar effective rates. Quick scenarios:

Run those numbers in your head. Spending $100-200 for a 1-in-15 chance at a $1,400 BCH block is not a guaranteed-profit move — most of the time you spend the money and find nothing — but the expected value math works out positively if BCH price holds and rental rates stay in this range. People genuinely do hit blocks this way. We’ve seen it happen on SoloFury more than once.

The rental approach is also how you solo mine without owning hardware, without paying for power, without dealing with heat or noise. You’re paying for pure probability. The variance is real, the upside is real, and the floor is the rental cost.

Practical tip: if you rent, target the smaller chains (BCH, BC2, BCH2, XEC). Rental rates are similar across chains because they’re priced per TH/s of generic SHA-256 — but the per-hash probability of hitting a smaller chain is hundreds to millions of times higher. Do the math, point the rental at the network where it has actual odds.

Variance — the part nobody warns you about

Solo mining is a Poisson process. That means: even if your mean time to a block is 60 days, the actual time follows an exponential distribution. Concretely:

• ~37% chance you find a block in less than ~half the mean time
• ~37% chance you wait somewhere between half and one-and-a-half times the mean
• ~26% chance you wait longer than the mean (up to several times longer)

If your mean is 60 days, there’s a ~5% chance you’ll wait over 180 days. There’s also a ~5% chance you’ll find one in the first 3 days. Both extremes are normal. Both happen. The miners who blow up emotionally are the ones who don’t internalize this — they assume “60 days mean” means “around day 50 to day 70,” and when they’re staring at day 130 with no block, they panic, change pools, change coins, change strategies. The math does not punish you for impatience, but it doesn’t reward you either.

The owl waits. The owl knows the field. The owl has seen long nights with nothing, and short nights with a fat mouse. The owl does not change fields out of frustration.

So what would the gufo actually do?

If you have a Bitaxe or NerdQAxe

Point it at BC2 or BCH2. Stop reading articles, just do it. The math finally works in your favor on those chains. Connect to bc2.solofury.com:8080 or bch2.solofury.com:8585, set your wallet address as username, walk away. You will probably find a block in days, not decades.

If you have a NerdOCTAxe (~10-11 TH/s)

BC2/BCH2 for thrill (multiple blocks per day expected), or XEC if you want a steady ~50-day cycle on a more liquid chain. SoloFury’s house NerdOCTAxe is currently on BCH2 with vardiff override. It’s a respectable hunting ground.

If you have one S21/S21+/S21 Pro

BCH. Just BCH. ~4-5 month mean to a $1,400 block. Realistic, mature, liquid market. Stratum: bch.solofury.com:7070. Don’t overthink it.

If you have multiple S21+ or any S21 XP Hydro / S23

BCH primary, with a small portion (10-20%) on XEC for variance. With 5+ rigs you’re looking at ~1 BCH block per month average plus regular XEC payouts. That’s no longer lottery — that’s a small, irregular paycheck.

If you have hashrate to burn (industrial scale)

BTC becomes mathematically reasonable at ~10 PH/s and up. Until then, BCH remains better expected value. The only reason to choose BTC over BCH at smaller scale is if you specifically want to hold BTC — and even then, you’d statistically be better off mining BCH and converting at finding time.

If you have no hardware

Rent. Target BCH or the smaller chains. $100-200 buys you a real shot at a $1,400 block. Set a budget you can afford to lose — most rentals don’t hit, that’s how variance works — and treat it as paying for entertainment with positive expected value. Don’t chase losses.

The price moonshot argument (and why we ignore it)

Some miners pick a coin betting the price will explode. “BCH might 10x. BC2 might 100x. XEC might be the next dog-themed memecoin.” Maybe. We’re not financial advisors and neither is anyone on Twitter pretending to be one.

But here’s the gufo’s take: solo mining is already a probability bet. You’re already gambling on finding a block. Stacking another probability bet — that the coin you mined moons before you sell — turns mining from “patient hunter” into “casino with extra steps.” Each layer of speculation cuts your expected value if you don’t size it right.

If you genuinely believe in a coin’s long-term value, fine: mine it, hold it. But choose your mining coin based on what your hashrate can realistically catch, not based on price predictions. Let price do whatever price does. The math doesn’t care about your bags.

The kicker

Solo mining isn’t a get-rich-quick game. It’s a long, patient hunt where the math eventually rewards the miners who pointed the right hashrate at the right chain and waited longer than was comfortable. Every block found on SoloFury — three BCH blocks and one XEC block in the last 19 days alone — was found by someone who did exactly that. They picked their chain. They configured their rig. They waited.

The rest of mining advice is noise. Hardware, hashrate, chain, time. Match them honestly to your reality, and the rewards come on their own schedule.

The owl doesn’t catch every mouse. But the owl that hunts the right field, on the right night, with the right eyes — that owl eats. The math is on your side. You just have to point your hash at the right sky.