Solo.ckpool
Solo.ckpool is a service that lets miners attempt solo Bitcoin mining without operating their own Bitcoin Core node. It does not use the proportional or pay-per-share reward model of a conventional mining pool: when a miner finds a valid block, the reward is assigned to that miner's Bitcoin address after the service fee.[1]
The service is operated by Con Kolivas, the developer of ckpool and CGMiner. The operator states that Solo.ckpool has processed solo-mining work since 2014.[1]
Operation
Solo mining has high reward variance. A miner receives no block reward unless its work finds a valid block. Shares displayed by Solo.ckpool provide feedback about submitted work and help estimate hashrate; they do not create a proportional payout claim.[1]
The service uses the Stratum mining protocol and accepts a Bitcoin address, optionally followed by a worker name, as the username. Registration is not required and the password field is ignored. An invalid Bitcoin address is rejected.[1] A typical configuration is:
cgminer -o stratum+tcp://stratum.ckpool.org:3333 -u YOUR_BITCOIN_ADDRESS.worker -p x
As of 14 September 2026, the main Stratum V1 endpoint is stratum.ckpool.org:3333; the service automatically selects a nearby server and provides failover. The operator also lists manual endpoints in the United States, Germany, Singapore and Australia, plus a high-difficulty rental endpoint on port 4334.[1]
Solo.ckpool also publishes Stratum V2 endpoints on ports 3336 and 4336, and an experimental V2 Job Declaration endpoint on port 3337. Compatible miners and proxies require the authority key shown on the service website, so the live configuration should be consulted rather than copied from an old article revision.[1]
Fee and operational characteristics
The operator states that the service charges a 2% fee and uses Bitcoin Core's default transaction selection without filtering transactions. The service avoids the storage and bandwidth cost of operating a local full node and connects to multiple Bitcoin nodes for block-change notification and propagation. A miner that already has an optimized node and network may receive no operational benefit and would still pay the service fee.[1]
The operator discourages Bitcoin mining below 100 GH/s except for learning or proof-of-concept use, and notes that CPU, GPU and FPGA mining are not practical for Bitcoin on this service. These limits do not alter the mathematical possibility of finding a block; they describe the very low probability at such hashrates.[1]