The rise of small, low-power, open-hardware mining devices, the kind a hobbyist assembles on a kitchen table, has brought a wave of new people into solo mining who’ve never run an industrial operation and never plan to. It’s worth being precise about what a single one of these small devices actually buys in terms of odds, without either inflating the number to sound impressive or dismissing it as pointless.

The honest starting point

A single small home device, even a well-built one, represents an extremely small fraction of Bitcoin’s total network hashrate, which is dominated by industrial-scale operations running enormous, purpose- built facilities. In pure probability terms, a single small device’s chance of finding any specific block is correspondingly tiny. That’s just arithmetic, and no amount of clever pool design or protocol choice changes that ratio.

Why people still do it anyway

The odds being small doesn’t mean the activity is pointless, and the reasons people run these small devices solo are usually not “I expect to get rich.” They’re closer to: participating directly in Bitcoin’s proof-of-work security model rather than only holding the asset, learning how mining actually works at a level a rented cloud contract never teaches, keeping a small, honest, low-stakes lottery ticket running in the background of ordinary life, and doing it non-custodially, so on the rare chance it does pay off, the reward goes straight to their own address with nothing to withdraw from anyone.

What scaling up actually does, and doesn’t do

Adding more small devices, or running a slightly larger one, increases your share of network hashrate proportionally, which proportionally shortens your expected wait. It’s a real effect, worth understanding correctly: doubling your hashrate roughly halves your expected wait, all else equal. But it’s easy to overestimate how much this changes the picture at small scale. Going from one small device to ten still leaves you an extremely small fraction of total network hashrate. The odds improve. They don’t transform.

What actually matters more than the odds calculation

For most people running this kind of hardware, the question that matters more than the exact odds number is whether the cost, in electricity and hardware, is one they’re comfortable treating as already spent the moment they turn the device on, independent of whether it ever finds anything. If the answer is yes, running a small device solo is a perfectly reasonable, honest hobby. If the answer depends on actually finding a block to feel worthwhile, the odds at this scale make that a genuinely risky bet to hang your satisfaction on.

What a non-custodial pool adds to this specific picture

For exactly this audience, small hardware, real hobbyist stakes, a non-custodial pool matters more than it might for a large operation, because the entire appeal of running your own small rig is usually self-custody and direct participation. Routing that reward, on the rare chance it happens, through a custodial balance undercuts the actual reason many people chose this hardware category in the first place.

A note on hardware longevity

Small open-hardware devices are also comparatively cheap to run for years at a time, since their power draw is modest enough that the electricity cost rarely forces an early retirement the way it sometimes does for larger, older industrial units. That longevity matters for the odds calculation too: more total time running the same small hashrate meaningfully adds up over a multi-year horizon, even if any single year still shows nothing.

NexusPool is built for exactly this kind of miner: small hardware, honest odds, non-custodial payout straight to your own address if it ever happens. The reasoning behind that design, not just the claim, is laid out in full on NexusPool’s about page for anyone running the numbers on their own small rig. Free, non-custodial software, not an investment, and no device size, however you scale it, ever guarantees a reward.

Trust nothing. Verify your own reasons for running the hardware match what the odds actually offer.

About NexusPool: NexusPool is free, non-custodial mining software built with small solo rigs in mind, where a found block pays out straight to the miner’s own address instead of a pool balance. The reasoning behind that design sits at nexuspool.io/about.