Solo vs pool mining on Malairte: the actual variance maths

Pool mining pays little and often; solo mining pays everything or nothing. Which suits you is a maths question, not a preference: it depends on your share of the network hashrate and how long a dry spell you can tolerate. On a large network a home rig solo-mines effectively never. On Malairte today the network is small enough that a single machine finds blocks in hours rather than years — which makes solo genuinely viable here, for now.

Key takeaways

• Block-finding is a Poisson process, so the average wait is a poor planning number on its own. The spread is what hurts.
• One in ten waits will be longer than 2.3× the average. One in a hundred will be longer than 4.6×.
• Your expected number of blocks per day is just your share of network hashrate multiplied by the number of blocks the network produces per day.
• Pools do not increase your expected earnings. They reduce the variance around them, minus a fee.
• Everything below changes as the network grows. Re-run the numbers rather than trusting a figure you read once.

How the maths actually works

Every hash you compute is an independent lottery ticket. Nothing you did previously improves your next attempt — the process is memoryless. That single property determines everything else, because it means the time until you find a block follows an exponential distribution.

The whole calculation is four lines:

share            = your hashrate / network hashrate
network blocks/day = 86,400 / block time in seconds
your blocks/day    = share * network blocks/day
mean wait          = 86,400 / your blocks per day

Malairte targets a 120-second block, so the network produces 86,400 / 120 = 720 blocks per day.

Why the average is not the number you should plan around

For an exponential distribution, the wait you will actually experience at percentile p is:

wait at percentile p = -mean * ln(1 - p)

Which gives three numbers worth memorising:

Note that the median is shorter than the mean. Most of your waits feel better than average, and then occasionally one is far worse. That asymmetry is what makes solo mining psychologically difficult even when the economics are fine.

A worked example, with real numbers

Malairte network hashrate was 1,250,323 H/s at height 132,518, read from a node on 2026-08-31. Difficulty was 41,559,809. Take a modest CPU miner at 5,000 H/s:

share         = 5,000 / 1,250,323        = 0.40%
your blocks/day = 0.0040 * 720            = 2.88 blocks/day
mean wait      = 86,400 / 2.88            = 30,007 s = 8.3 hours

Applying the percentiles to that 8.3-hour mean:

So a single ordinary processor, on this network, on this date, would expect to solo-find a block roughly three times a day — with the occasional gap of a day and a half. That is an unusual answer. On Bitcoin the same calculation gives a wait measured in millions of years.

Why the answer is so favourable here, and why that will change

It is favourable for one reason only: the network is small. A 5,000 H/s CPU is 0.4% of Malairte's total hashrate. The same machine is a rounding error on any large chain.

This cuts both ways, and it would be dishonest to present only the flattering half:

• It will not last. If network hashrate rises tenfold, your blocks per day fall tenfold and your mean wait rises from 8 hours to 3.5 days. A hundredfold and it is over a month.
• A small network is a less secure network. Low total hashrate means the cost of mounting a 51% attack is correspondingly low. That is a genuine risk of any young proof-of-work chain, this one included, and it is the flip side of the same number that makes your solo odds good.
• Difficulty adjusts. These figures are a snapshot, not a forecast. Use the calculator with today's numbers.

So when does a pool make sense?

A pool combines many miners' work, finds blocks far more often, and pays each participant in proportion to the work they contributed. It does not change your expected return — it narrows the distribution around it, and charges a fee (commonly 1–2%) for doing so.

Choose a pool when:

• Your share of the network is small enough that solo waits run into weeks.
• You want predictable, regular payouts rather than lumpy ones.
• You are testing a new setup and want quick confirmation it works at all.

Choose solo when:

• The maths above gives you a tolerable wait — which, on Malairte today, it does for most machines.
• You want to run your own node and validate independently rather than trusting a pool operator.
• You would rather not pay a fee, and can absorb the variance.

There is a decentralisation argument for solo mining too: pools concentrate block production in the hands of whoever operates them. Solo miners each validate and build independently.

Run it for your own hardware

Do not take the example above as your answer — it is one hashrate on one date. The solo mining variance estimator takes your hashrate and the current network hashrate and returns the mean and all three percentiles. It publishes the formula it uses, which is the same one written out above, so you can check it by hand.

Current network hashrate is on the live network page, read directly from a node.

What this does not tell you

• Nothing here is about money. It counts blocks, not earnings. What a block is worth depends on a price this guide deliberately does not assume.
• It assumes constant difficulty and no downtime. Real results are worse: difficulty moves, rigs throttle, connections drop.
• It ignores orphans and stale work. Occasionally two miners find a block at nearly the same moment and one loses.
• Pool fees, payout thresholds and minimum withdrawals are not modelled.

Educational information, not financial advice. Network figures read from a Malairte node on 2026-08-31 and will be out of date by the time you read this — use the calculator. See our editorial policy.