Which coin should I solo mine?

If you run a Bitaxe or a NerdQaxe or a Hammer Miner, sooner or later you end up in the same Discord thread: which coin should I be pointing this thing at?

Usually the answer is BTC, because BTC is the most valuable block and solo mining is about waiting for one big, rare win. That isn't wrong. But it isn't the whole picture either.

The better answer is a ranking, and the ranking is different for every device.

This post walks through the math, the tradeoffs, and a live example from my own fleet so you can see what the answer looks like in practice.

The ranking formula

For any given device mining any given coin, expected value per day looks like this:

EV = (your_hashrate / network_hashrate) × blocks_per_day × block_reward × price_usd

Four inputs, one number out. No chance factor, no luck fudge. If you mined that coin forever with that hardware, this is what you'd earn per day on average.

The catch is that none of those four numbers sit still. Network hashrate moves with every retarget. Prices move constantly. Block rewards step down at halvings. Blocks-per-day is only approximately the advertised "10 minute target"; in practice it's whatever came out of the last difficulty adjustment.

Those four inputs also live in four different places. Network hashrate for DigiByte is on digibyte.io. Block reward for BC2 is on a single explorer I had to patch around twice. Bitcoin difficulty is trivially available from any explorer. eCash has to be pulled from its own node-backed API. The only reason the SoloOdds calculator can rank all of them together is that the ingestion pipeline knows where each number lives and normalizes them into one shape every 15 minutes.

Why "just mine BTC" is an incomplete answer

BTC is the most valuable block you can win. At current prices, a Bitcoin block is worth somewhere north of two hundred thousand dollars in subsidy plus fees. No altcoin comes close.

But EV isn't the block value. EV is the block value times your probability of winning it. For a home miner, that probability is small enough that the block value almost doesn't matter.

Take my own fleet: four NerdQaxe++ units totaling 20.1 TH/s. My units are slightly overclocked, so if you pull up the NerdQaxe++ page in the calculator you'll see 4.8 TH/s per stock unit, not the ~5 TH/s each of mine is running. Against the current Bitcoin network hashrate (roughly 800 EH/s as I'm writing this), expected time to solo mine a BTC block with that fleet is around 942 years. The block is worth ~$218,891. Multiply those together, subtract power costs, and the EV rounds to a negative number. On average, you'd lose money mining BTC with that fleet.

BC2 has a network hashrate closer to 1 EH/s. That same fleet has about a 5.9% chance of finding a BC2 block every day, and the block is worth ~$35. Expected time to a BC2 block: about 17 days. EV: roughly $1.26/day. The math comes out positive.

For that fleet, BC2 beats BTC by about $1.49/day on EV. The reason is simple: (your hashrate / network hashrate) is much higher on BC2 than on BTC, and that ratio is what actually matters.

The block you're most likely to win is not the block worth the most.

A live ranking, start to finish

Here's what the ranking looks like right now for that same fleet, sorted by EV per day. These are live numbers from the same data feed the calculator uses.

Rank	Coin	EV/day	Daily block chance	Notes
1	BC2	+$1.26	5.9%	Low network hashrate, small block value, great ratio.
2	XEC (eCash)	+$0.32	5.4%	Second-best hashrate ratio, lower block value than BC2.
3	DGB (DigiByte SHA-256)	−$0.17	44.5%	Daily blocks are likely, but the block reward at current prices doesn't clear power.
4	BCH	−$0.19	0.05%	Block is valuable, hashrate too high to realistically compete.
5	BTC	−$0.23	0.0003%	Needle in a haystack. Positive outcomes are vanishingly rare.

A few notes on the ranking.

The top two rows are positive EV for this fleet. That isn't a universal property of solo mining. It depends on my fleet, my electricity rate, and today's difficulty and price data. Plug in an S9 at $0.18/kWh power and almost everything goes red.

Row 3 is where things get interesting. DigiByte has a 44.5% daily block chance for this fleet, meaning the odds of actually winning a block in a given 24-hour window are nearly a coin flip. That's the most "actually solo mining a block" coin on the list. But because the reward times the price doesn't clear the power bill, the EV is still mildly negative. Some miners would happily eat a small negative EV to feel the blocks hitting. That's a valid choice, and no ranking tool should talk you out of it.

Rows 4 and 5 are what most solo mining content on the internet defaults to. They have the lowest block chance and, for this fleet, the worst EV. If you're optimizing for expected dollars, both are worse than leaving your fleet idle.

The mental model

When I'm deciding where to point a device, three questions come up in order.

First: what does the EV ranking look like today? Anything positive is in play. Anything negative gets flagged but not automatically ruled out. If the delta is small and I want to point at a specific coin for fun, I will.

Second: what's my tolerance for variance? Solo mining is high variance by definition. You're either earning zero for weeks or earning a lot in one transaction. A 5% daily block chance feels very different from a 0.05% daily block chance even at equivalent EV. If you want to feel blocks land, you want the high-probability coins. If you want to chase the rare big win, you want the low-probability ones.

Third: what does the rank look like versus yesterday? What I care about most is when a coin suddenly jumps rank. That's the signal that something changed: difficulty dropped, price spiked, hashrate fell off. The window to act on it is short. A static rank is a snapshot. The deltas are where the real money is.

The tl;dr

There is no single best coin to solo mine. The best coin is whatever has the best EV for your exact device at the moment you're deciding, and that ranking shifts every fifteen minutes. "Just mine BTC" is the default answer because it's the easy one to say. It isn't the right one.

If you want to see the ranking for your own hardware, with your actual hashrate, your actual electricity rate, and live data, the SoloOdds calculator does exactly that. No signup, updated every 15 minutes, every supported device.