How to solo mine Bitcoin with a regular PC.

Bitcoin solo mining is a funny hobby where you can learn much about Bitcoin and have a SMALL chance of earning good money. Imagine that you have a lottery where your chance to win is a thousand times less than a regular one, but you can play a thousand times every second when, in a regular one, you have one or two chances to play by week.

I configured the Bitcoin Core to run behind a Tor network. Consider always doing it when you are using Bitcoin Core.

I prepared a docker setup to facilitate you to have your owner lottery.

Clone the GitHub repository:

git clone https://github.com/ricardochaves/bitcoin-solo-mining

The first thing that you need to do is synchronize your blockchain. Let's use a prune Node and not a full node.

Execute docker-compose up bitcoin-core; when the compose creates a btc directory in your server root directory, you must stop the container now.

Copy the bitcoin.conf file to btc directory.12

You can start the container again and wait many days to sync all the blockchain, or you can download the last snapshot of the blockchain at https://bitcoin-snapshots.jaonoct.us/.

The download will give you two directories and a bitcoin.conf file. You must replace the blocks and the chainstate directories inside the btc directory. Don't replace the bitcoin.conf file.

When you start, you can see the logs showing you bitcoin.conf is working:

2023-09-02T10:42:48Z Config file: /home/bitcoin/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf
2023-09-02T10:42:48Z Config file arg: maxmempool="1000"
2023-09-02T10:42:48Z Config file arg: proxy="127.0.0.1:9050"
2023-09-02T10:42:48Z Config file arg: prune="550"
2023-09-02T10:42:48Z Config file arg: rpcallowip="0.0.0.0/0"
2023-09-02T10:42:48Z Config file arg: rpcbind=****
2023-09-02T10:42:48Z Config file arg: rpcbind=****
2023-09-02T10:42:48Z Config file arg: rpcpassword=****
2023-09-02T10:42:48Z Config file arg: rpcuser=****

While Bitcoin core is syncing, we will set up our miner.

You need a BTC wallet to add in start.sh file. Replace the YOUR_WALLET value. Please don't use an exchange address. If you have luck and find a block, you will have problems getting your bitcoins from an exchange.

Stop your bitcoin-core container, and from now you will use docker compose up. You will see some errors in a miner container; it's normal because the bitcoin-core container needs some time to receive connections. Just wait some minutes, and you will see the logs of your mining working.

[2023-09-02 11:33:01] thread 0: 336634816 hashes, 9140 khash/s

If you want to run the miner of side a container, expose the 8332 port in your bitcoin-core container and configure your miner in your operational system.

September 02, 2023

Background image credits forImmo Wegmann