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The world of Bitcoin mining has come back from industrial-scale farms to the desktop, thanks to "lottery miners" and efficient home-scale ASIC hardware. btc.onpool.net is built for exactly that audience: Bitaxe, NerdQAxe and everything up to an S21.

This guide covers the two things you have to get right before your miner connects: which mining mode you want, and which port goes with it.

Understanding the Mining Modes: SOLO vs. PPLNS

1. SOLO Mining (The Lottery)

In SOLO mode you share nothing. If your miner - even a small Bitaxe - finds a valid block, you receive the entire block reward (currently 3.125 BTC plus fees). The probability is very low, hence "lottery mining". Pool fee: 1.0%.

2. PPLNS (Pay Per Last N Shares)

PPLNS is for miners who want consistency. The pool combines the hashrate of every connected miner, and when the pool finds a block the reward is split in proportion to the shares you contributed during the payout window. Your balance grows steadily instead of staying at zero until a jackpot. Pool fee: 1.5%.

The btc.onpool.net Port Guide

Each pool has exactly two ports: one plain TCP and one TLS. Pick your mode, pick encrypted or not, and you are done.

The full list, including LCC and XMR, is on the Connect page.

To use a TLS port, the TLS option has to be enabled in your miner's pool settings. If your firmware does not offer it, use the TCP port instead - the connection will simply fail otherwise.

Why there is no longer a port per device

The pool used to run a separate port for each hardware class - one for the Bitaxe, one for the NerdQAxe, one for large ASICs. Each of those ports carried its own difficulty setting, because a Bitaxe and an S21 need work that differs by several orders of magnitude. Sending an S21's difficulty to a Bitaxe means it finds almost nothing; sending a Bitaxe's difficulty to an S21 floods the pool with shares.

That split is no longer needed. The pool's variable difficulty now measures each worker individually and converges on the right difficulty within the first minutes of a connection, then keeps tracking it as the device warms up, throttles or changes fan curve. A 500 GH Bitaxe and a 200 TH S21 can share one port and each still receives work sized for it.

So the port only decides which pool and whether the link is encrypted. Difficulty is handled for you.

Old ports still work. If your miner is configured with one of the retired per-device ports, leave it alone - nothing is being shut off. There is just no longer any reason to choose between them.

How to Set Up Your Miner

1. URL / Host: stratum+tcp://btc.onpool.net:6610 for SOLO, or stratum+ssl://btc.onpool.net:6611 for the encrypted version.

2. User: Your_Bitcoin_Wallet_Address.WorkerName - the worker name is free text, e.g. MyBitaxe.

3. Password: x. Leave it at that; a d= value here pins your difficulty and switches off the automatic tuning described above.

Pro Tip: If you are solo mining, check your Bitcoin address carefully. There is no pool balance to withdraw - a block reward goes straight to the address you configured.

Step-by-step setup guide: Connect