Interactive tool
Solo Mining Variance Estimator
See how often a single home Malairte rig would solo-find a block, with realistic percentile bounds for the wait between blocks.
Your share
0.010000%
Expected blocks / day
0.0720
Per month
2.16
Per year
26.3
Time between blocks (solo)
Mining is a Poisson process. Even at the mean rate, individual gaps follow an exponential distribution. Here is what to expect:
- Average wait
- 13.9 days
- Median wait (50/50 coin flip)
- 9.6 days
- 90% chance you've found one by
- 1.1 months
- 99% chance you've found one by
- 2.1 months
Verdict
Solo mining is a slow lottery - expect long stretches of nothing, then occasional full block rewards.
Estimates only. Real waits also depend on network difficulty changes and miner uptime. Pool mining smooths the variance by paying you proportional shares instead.
Methodology
How this calculator works
Finding a block is a memoryless random process: every hash is an independent lottery ticket, and past failures do not make success sooner. That makes the wait between blocks you find follow an exponential distribution, which is why the average is a poor guide on its own and the percentiles matter more.
The arithmetic
- share = your hashrate in H/s / network hashrate in H/s
- network blocks per day = 86,400 / block time in seconds (120 s target)
- your blocks per day = share * network blocks per day
- mean wait between your blocks = 86,400 / your blocks per day
- percentile wait = -mean * ln(1 - p), giving P50 = mean * 0.6931, P90 = mean * 2.3026, P99 = mean * 4.6052
What it assumes
- Difficulty stays constant over the period you are estimating.
- Your rig runs continuously with no downtime, thermal throttling, or rejected work.
- A month is treated as 30 days and a year as 365 days.
Where it breaks down
- Difficulty moves with network hashrate. If the network grows, your real wait is longer than this estimate.
- P90 means one wait in ten is longer than the figure shown. Solo mining is genuinely high-variance, and the median is not what you should plan around.
- No pool fees, orphan or stale blocks, or payout thresholds are modelled.
Educational tool, not financial advice. Outputs are estimates from the inputs you supply and the assumptions above. See our editorial policy and disclosures.