FAQ: How This Pool Works

Ask yourself what you want from your miner. If the dream of hitting a whole block is why you bought a Bitaxe, pick Solo (port 2121) and accept that the realistic outcome is "nothing, possibly for years". If you want to see sats trickle in and verify the whole setup works end-to-end, pick Shared (port 4242). Many people run one miner on each.

Brutally honest: a 1 TH/s Bitaxe against the entire Bitcoin network is roughly like buying a handful of lottery tickets per week. The expected time to find a block is measured in thousands of years, but every ~10 minutes there is a fresh draw, and someone with small hardware does win one every now and then. That's the whole appeal: tiny odds, full prize. Nobody can improve those odds; anyone claiming otherwise is selling something.

Solo: a Bitcoin address from a wallet you control (hardware wallet, Sparrow, etc., not an exchange deposit address). If you find a block, the reward goes there with no way to redirect it afterwards, so double-check it.

Shared: a Lightning Address: it looks like an e-mail address (you@walletprovider.com) and most Lightning wallets give you one for free (Wallet of Satoshi, Blink, Alby, Strike…). Daily payouts arrive there automatically.

In your miner's settings, set:

Solo:
  Stratum URL: lnpool.org  Port: 2121
  User: yourBitcoinAddress.workername (e.g. bc1q…xyz.bitaxe1)
  Password: anything, e.g. x

Shared:
  Stratum URL: lnpool.org  Port: 4242
  User: a Bitcoin address, a dot, then your Lightning Address, both verbatim, e.g. bc1qexample.you@wallet.com
  Password: x

No special encoding needed: since a Bitcoin address has no dots, the first dot cleanly separates it from your Lightning Address, even if your address has a subdomain. The Bitcoin address is just your account label; payouts go to the Lightning Address.

Finding a block means finding a hash below an astronomically small target. Because that's so rare, the pool gives your miner an easier practice target: every hash that beats it is a share: proof your miner is genuinely working. Shares are how the stats pages measure your hashrate.

Best Share is the luckiest single hash your miner ever produced, expressed as a difficulty. Here's the fun part: if your Best Share ever exceeds the current network difficulty, you just found a real block. Watching that number creep upward is half the hobby.

Your miner counts every hash it computes; the pool can only estimate your hashrate from the shares you happen to submit, averaged over time windows (1 min, 1 h, 1 d). Short-term the estimate swings with pure luck; the longer the window, the closer it converges to your miner's real number. A freshly connected miner can take an hour to show sensible values. That's statistics, not a fault.

1% in both modes. Solo: the fee output is part of the block's coinbase transaction itself. You can verify it on-chain; 99% goes straight to your address in the same block. Shared: 1% of your earnings, plus a small network-fee reserve (0.5%) that covers the Lightning routing cost of delivering your payout.

Solo: only if you find a block, then instantly and automatically, because the payout is the block. The reward becomes spendable after 100 confirmations (≈17 hours; a Bitcoin consensus rule for all miners, not a pool rule).

Shared: the pool's upstream (Ocean) credits earnings for every block Ocean finds. Your slice is proportional to the accepted shares you submitted within the reward window, which mirrors Ocean's TIDES system: each share keeps earning across roughly the next 8 Ocean blocks, so stopping your miner doesn't forfeit work you already did. Payouts go to your Lightning Address once per day (amounts under 1 sat simply roll over to the next day). Mine how you want, fewer hours just mean fewer shares and a smaller slice. Failed deliveries (wallet offline, etc.) are retried automatically.

Solo: never. The block pays your address directly; the pool physically cannot touch or redirect it.

Shared: briefly, yes: earnings arrive from Ocean at the pool and are then paid onward to you via Lightning. Keep the amounts at stake in mind: for typical small-miner earnings this window is small change, but it is a trust assumption, and we'd rather say so plainly than pretend otherwise.

Give it a few minutes: stats appear after your miner submits its first shares, not on connect. Then check the stats page for exactly the address/Lightning Address you configured as username (before the dot). Typos in the username are by far the most common cause: a wrong Bitcoin address in Solo mode means shares are counted, but a found block would pay that address, so triple-check it.