BCMonster FAQ

BCMonster is a multi-coin SHA-256 mining pool that has been running since 2016, offering both pool and solo mining on every coin. It supports Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), DigiByte (DGB), Peercoin (PPC), Bitcoin II (BC2), Bitcoin Cash II (BCH2), Namecoin (NMC), and Fractal Bitcoin (FB).

You point your SHA-256 miner at BCMonster's stratum server using your wallet address as the username. The port you connect to decides the mode — use a coin's pool port to share rewards proportionally with other miners, or its solo port to keep the full block reward if your miner finds it. Both modes work on every coin, and the password can be anything (x is fine). BCMonster handles all node infrastructure, block submission, and payouts at a flat 1.5% fee on all coins, both modes.

No account creation needed. Your wallet address IS your account. Just point your miner at BCMonster using your wallet address as the username, and your dashboard appears automatically at bcmonster.com/worker.html?address=YOUR_WALLET.

To track earnings, receive payouts, and access cross-device features, register your wallet in the Wallet panel (the wallet icon on the dashboard). This links a display name and PIN to your address.

BCMonster charges a 1.5% fee on all mining — both pool and solo. There are no hidden fees, no withdrawal fees, and no deposit fees. The fee is taken from block rewards before payout.

All coins on BCMonster use the SHA-256 algorithm, the same as Bitcoin — so any SHA-256 miner works on all of them.

BTC BCH DGB PPC BC2 BCH2 XEC NMC FB

NMC and FB are merge-mined alongside BTC at no extra cost — your BTC miner earns both simultaneously.

Yes. The whole site is available in 18 languages: English, Español, Português, Русский, 中文, Deutsch, Français, Italiano, Türkçe, Українська, 日本語, 한국어, Tiếng Việt, Bahasa Indonesia, العربية, हिन्दी, Polski and Nederlands.

It is picked automatically: first from your browser's language setting, and if that gives us nothing useful, from the country your connection comes from. You don't have to do anything — the page simply opens in your language.

To choose a language yourself, click the globe button in the site header (it shows the current language code, e.g. EN), or use the Language row in the Wallet panel or the globe in the chat header. Your choice is remembered on this device and applies to every page, the chat, and the Verus pool at /vrsc. Pick Auto to go back to automatic detection.

Yes, automatically. Messages written in another language are shown to you in your language, with a small tag naming the original language. Click the tag to see the original text, and click again to return to the translation. Your own messages are stored exactly as you typed them — other miners see them translated into their language.

Translation follows the same language setting as the site (automatic, or whatever you picked with the globe button). Mining terms — share, stale, block, orphan, solo, pool, hashrate, difficulty, vardiff, worker, payout, luck, merge mining — are translated consistently, and @mentions, usernames, wallet addresses, tickers, numbers, links and code are left untouched.

Translations are generated automatically and refreshed every night, so anything new on the site appears in English first and is translated within a day. If a phrase reads badly in your language, tell us in the chat or on Discord (quote the English text if you can) and we'll correct it by hand — hand-made fixes are kept and never overwritten by the nightly update.

You can always switch to English with the globe button to compare.

You need a wallet address for each coin you want to receive payouts for. Use a wallet you control the keys to — here are reliable options:

• Bitcoin (BTC): Electrum, Sparrow, BlueWallet (mobile), Exodus, or any hardware wallet (Ledger, Trezor)
• Bitcoin Cash (BCH): Electron Cash, Bitcoin.com Wallet, or Exodus
• DigiByte (DGB): Official DigiByte wallets (desktop & mobile) or DigiByte Core
• Peercoin (PPC): Peercoin wallets (Core for desktop, mobile apps listed there)
• Bitcoin Cash II (BCH2): BCH2 web wallet or the desktop wallet from bch2.org
• eCash (XEC): Cashtab (web/extension) or other eCash wallets — use your ecash:q… address
• Namecoin (NMC): Namecoin downloads — Namecoin Core or the lighter Electrum-NMC
• Fractal Bitcoin (FB): UniSat or OKX Wallet (browser & mobile) — Fractal uses Bitcoin-style addresses; a BTC address on a wallet that supports Fractal works
• Verus (VRSC) + CHIPS, vARRR, vDEX: Verus wallets — Verus Desktop for Windows, macOS and Linux, or Verus Mobile for iPhone/iPad and Android. One VRSC address (starts with R) receives your VRSC and the merge-mined CHIPS, vARRR and vDEX — all three PBaaS chains share the Verus address format, and both wallets can hold all four coins.

We don't recommend it. An exchange deposit address is not a wallet you control:

• Exchanges can change or retire deposit addresses at any time — a payout sent to an old one is usually gone.
• Many exchanges reject small or frequent deposits (mining payouts are exactly that) or hold them for manual review.
• Some exchanges don't credit coinbase/mining transactions at all, and some don't support every coin we pay out (NMC, FB, BCH2, BC2, CHIPS, vARRR, vDEX).
• If anything goes wrong, the pool can't help — the funds were sent exactly where you asked.

Use a self-custody wallet from the list above for payouts, then transfer to an exchange yourself when you want to sell.

Follow these steps to set up your wallet profile:

1. Go to bcmonster.com and enter your wallet address in the search bar, or your miner will auto-register when it connects.
2. Click your address or navigate to your worker dashboard. You'll see your miner's stats.
3. Click the wallet icon (top right) to open the Wallet Panel.
4. Enter a display name — this replaces your long address on leaderboards and chat.
5. Set a PIN to secure your profile and enable cross-device access.
6. Add wallet addresses for each coin you want payouts for, including NMC and FB for merge mining bonuses.

No — each coin requires its own native address. A Bitcoin address cannot receive Peercoin, for example. You need a separate wallet address for each coin you want to earn payouts on.

Your mining username (the address in your stratum URL) determines which coin's pool you're mining on. Your payout address for other coins is registered separately in your wallet profile.

For merge-mined coins (NMC and FB), you register separate NMC and FB addresses in your wallet panel — these are different from your BTC address.

Use your wallet address as the username, with an optional worker name after a dot:

Examples:

Worker names help you track multiple machines on your dashboard. Keep them short and descriptive (antminer, bitaxe, nerd1, etc).

All connections use bcmonster.com. Choose the port for your coin and tier:

Renting hashrate? See NiceHash, Mining Rig Rentals and Braiins Hashpower for the rental ports and setup.

Click Quick Connect on the dashboard for a full table with copy buttons for every coin and tier.

Using Stratum V2? Same host and ports — see Does BCMonster support Stratum V2?

BCMonster lets every miner on every coin choose between pool and solo mode with a single password change — no port change, no reconfiguration, no waiting. The password field in your miner's stratum settings controls it:

This works on all coins and all ports. Whether you're mining BTC, BCH, DGB, PPC, BCH2, or BC2 — just change the password field. Your username (wallet address) and stratum URL stay exactly the same.

Examples for Bitcoin:

The same applies to every other coin — just swap in the right port and wallet address for your chosen coin. Same stratum host (bcmonster.com), same password trick.

NiceHash Mining Rig Rentals Braiins Hashpower

Yes, all three. Rented hashrate is paid to your wallet exactly like your own miners. Pool or solo, PPLNS, merge mining (NMC + FB on the BTC ports) and the 1.5% fee all work the same. Use the Pro ports: they start at 500K difficulty, which is what rental platforms expect. For big rentals (roughly 500 TH/s and up) the Elite ports (3.5M start) are fine too. Either way Rapid Tune settles a rental's difficulty within a few minutes.

Rental ports for every coin (host is always bcmonster.com):

• Use the wallet address for the coin you point the rental at. A BTC address on the BTC port, a PPC address on the PPC port, and so on.
• Use stratum+tcp:// on these ports. If your platform wants an encrypted connection, use the TLS ports with stratum+tls:// (Pro: BTC 3443/3444, BCH 3663/3664 · Elite: BTC 3445/3446, BCH 3667/3668). Pointing an SSL/TLS connection at a normal port won't connect.
• AsicBoost (version rolling) is on for every port, so AsicBoost rental markets work as-is.
• Your worker page may show Calculating for the first few minutes while the hashrate average builds up. That's normal.

Step-by-step setup: NiceHash · Mining Rig Rentals · Braiins Hashpower.

NiceHash rents hashrate through its Hashpower Marketplace. You add BCMonster as one of your pools once, then point orders at it.

1. In NiceHash, open the Hashpower Marketplace and go to your pools list, then Add new pool.
2. Algorithm: SHA256 (or SHA256AsicBoost — both work here).
3. Stratum hostname: bcmonster.com — just the name, without stratum+tcp://.
4. Port: the Pro port for your coin from the rental port table (BTC 3334, PPC 1112, BCH 3556…). Use the Elite port for very large orders.
5. Username: YOUR_WALLET.workername   Password: x for pool, m=solo for solo.
6. Save. NiceHash runs a short test connection to check the pool; once it passes, create your order and choose this pool.

Give the worker a name you'll recognise (for example .nicehash) so you can find it on your worker page.

On Mining Rig Rentals you rent a specific rig and tell it which pools to mine on.

1. Rent a SHA-256 rig (or SHA-256 AsicBoost — both work here). In the rental's pool settings, or in a saved pool profile, add a pool.
2. Pool / host: stratum+tcp://bcmonster.com   Port: the Pro port for your coin from the rental port table (BTC 3334, PPC 1112…), or Elite for big rigs.
3. Worker: YOUR_WALLET.workername   Password: x for pool, m=solo for solo.
4. Put BCMonster at the top of the list so the rig mines here first.

MRR's rental page counts hashrate on its own side, so for the first few minutes its numbers and ours won't match exactly. They line up as both averages fill in.

Braiins Hashpower lets you bid for hashrate and send it to any pool. It only rents to pools that give its connections at least 7 bytes of extranonce2 space (it splits that space across the rigs behind it). BCMonster does this automatically for Braiins on every SHA-256 port; NiceHash, MRR and your own miners keep their usual settings.

1. When you place a bid, enter the destination pool URL: stratum+tcp://bcmonster.com:PORT using the Pro port for your coin from the rental port table (BTC 3334, BCH 3556…), or Elite for large bids.
2. Username: YOUR_WALLET.workername   Password: x for pool, m=solo for solo (or use the solo port).

SHA-256 coins only (BTC, BCH, DGB, PPC, BC2, BCH2, XEC, FB), not Verus.

Yes — on the same ports you already use. Every Standard, Pro and Elite port on every coin accepts both Stratum V1 and Stratum V2. The pool tells them apart automatically when your miner connects, so you just choose V1 or V2 in your miner's settings. Nothing else changes, and you can switch back and forth whenever you like.

What V2 gives you: the connection between your miner and the pool is encrypted and authenticated, so nobody in between (a public Wi-Fi, a compromised router, your ISP) can read it or redirect your hashrate to someone else. Your miner checks the pool's key every time it connects, and refuses anything that isn't really BCMonster.

Settings for a Bitaxe (AxeOS 2.14+ or Harlo-OS), NerdQAxe, or any miner with Stratum V2:

The pool key (also called the authority key or authority public key) is BCMonster's public identity. It's the same for every miner and every port, it's safe to share, and it never changes — paste it once. Some firmware (for example Braiins OS) puts it on the end of the pool address instead of in its own box:

• Not on the ESP32 lottery ports (998x / 999x) — ESP32 miners don't speak V2, so those stay V1.
• Not on the TLS ports (BTC 3443–3446, BCH 3663/3664/3667/3668) — V2 is already encrypted; use V2 on the regular port instead.
• Miner won't connect on V2? Check the pool key was pasted completely (51 characters, starting 9cYb), and that the miner's firmware supports Stratum V2. Switching back to V1 always works.

Any SHA-256 miner works with BCMonster. That covers:

• Antminer series — S9, S17, S19, S21, and all variants
• Whatsminer — M20, M30, M50 series
• Canaan Avalon / AvalonMini / Nano 3
• Bitaxe — Ultra, Gamma, Hex, Supra. Open-source small ASIC miners using repurposed BM1366/BM1368/BM1370 chips. These are real SHA-256 ASICs, not ESP32 miners — connect via Standard ports (3333, etc.)
• NerdMiner / NMiner / JingleMiner — ESP32-based lottery miners with very low hashrate (~50–80 KH/s). Use the dedicated lottery ports (9999, etc.)
• NerdQAxe / NerdQAxe+ — small open-source ASIC miners using BM1366/BM1370 chips, similar to Bitaxe. Connect via Standard ports (3333 for BTC), not the lottery ports.
• NMiner, JingleMiner and other ESP32-based lottery miners
• USB Bitcoin miners (GekkoScience, etc.)
• Any miner supporting the Stratum protocol

NerdMiners and similar ESP32-based lottery miners use the dedicated low-diff lottery ports:

1. Connect to your NerdMiner/Bitaxe's web UI (usually at its IP address on your network)
2. Find the Pool / Stratum settings
3. Set the stratum URL to stratum+tcp://bcmonster.com:9999
4. Set username to your BTC wallet address (with optional worker name: bc1q...xyz.nerd1)
5. Set password to x
6. Save and reboot — your miner should connect within a minute

AsicBoost (BIP310 overt version rolling) is a mining optimization that can improve efficiency by up to 20% by reusing part of the block header computation.

BCMonster automatically enables it on all coins and all ports. If your ASIC supports version rolling (most modern Antminers, Whatsminers, and Bitaxe do), it will be used automatically — no configuration needed.

You can confirm it's working if your miner reports "version rolling" or "AsicBoost" in its status, or if your pool hashrate is slightly higher than your miner's rated hashrate.

Variable difficulty (vDiff) automatically adjusts the share difficulty sent to your miner based on its hashrate. This keeps your miner submitting shares at the right rate — not too fast, not too slow.

• Standard (port 3333) — starts at 20K, 15s target. Best for small/mid ASICs up to 99 TH/s — Bitaxe, NerdQAxe, single-chip home miners.
• Pro (port 3334) — starts at 500K, never drops below 50K, 30s target. For 100–499 TH/s (S19 XP and above) and required for NiceHash, MRR and Braiins Hashpower rentals.
• Elite (port 3337) — starts at 3.5M, never drops below 50K, 60s target, 300s retarget, 35% variance. For farms and very large operations 500+ TH/s — also works for NiceHash, MRR and Braiins Hashpower.
• Lottery ports (9999 solo / 9989 pool) — start at 0.001, 15s target. Best for NerdMiner, NMiner, and other sub-1-MH/s ESP32 lottery devices. Bitaxe/NerdQAxe (real ASIC chips, not ESP32) should use the Standard port 3333.

Not sure where you land? Start on Standard — vDiff will settle to the right level for your hardware within a few minutes either way, thanks to BCMonster Rapid Tune.

BCMonster Rapid Tune is our stratum difficulty engine — stratum difficulty that keeps up. It is on every port of every coin, pool and solo, including the TLS ports. You don't need to set anything.

The problem it solves. Every port starts a new miner at a fixed difficulty (20K Standard, 500K Pro, 3.5M Elite), because the pool can't know your hashrate until shares arrive. Classic vardiff then creeps toward the right value about ±30% at a time, once every few minutes. For a 9 PH/s Mining Rig Rentals rig that meant 30+ minutes of flooding the pool with tiny shares, and rental platforms can flag the pool as "not responding" while that happens.

How Rapid Tune works. It watches the gap between your shares and compares it with the port's target:

• Way too fast (8 shares averaging under half the target band) — it adjusts immediately, without waiting for the retarget timer, and can raise difficulty up to 4× in one step.
• Way too slow (4 shares averaging more than twice the band) — it can halve difficulty in one step.
• About 2× off (6+ shares averaging under three-quarters of the band, or 4+ more than 1.5× over it) — on the next retarget it doubles difficulty or cuts it to 0.6×, instead of creeping.
• Close to target — gentle moves of at most ±30%, only on the retarget timer, so it doesn't chase share-timing luck.
• Inside the target band — no change at all. Your share rate and the hashrate chart stay smooth.

After every adjustment the measurement starts over, so each decision only uses shares mined at the new difficulty.

Real example. An ~18 PH/s rental on BCH Elite starts at 3.5M and sends more than one share a second. Rapid Tune goes 3.5M → 14M → 56M → 224M in about 2–3 minutes and stops there, about one share per minute. Before Rapid Tune the same rental was still at 8M after 30 minutes.

Payouts are processed automatically after a block is found and confirmed:

1. Your miner finds a block — congrats!
2. The block goes through a maturity period on-chain before its reward becomes spendable — 100 confirmations on BTC, BCH, BCH2, BC2, DGB, NMC, FB and XEC, and 500 on PPC, which is the longest of any coin here.
3. Once mature, the payment processor automatically sends the reward to your registered wallet address.
4. Transaction appears in your wallet within minutes of the payout cycle.

Yes, each coin has a minimum payout threshold to avoid tiny uneconomical transactions:

• BTC: 0.001 BTC
• BCH: 0.001 BCH
• BCH2: 0.01 BCH2
• BC2: 0.01 BC2
• DGB: 1 DGB
• PPC: 0.01 PPC
• NMC: 0.01 NMC
• FB: 0.0001 FB
• XEC: 100 XEC

If you're solo mining, you'll typically receive a full block reward (minus fee) in one payout when your miner finds a block. If you're pool mining, you accumulate your PPLNS share of each block the pool finds, paid out once your balance clears the minimum above.

• Maturing: A block was found and confirmed on-chain, but the coinbase reward isn't spendable yet. It needs to reach the maturity threshold (e.g. 100 BTC blocks = ~16.7 hours).
• Ready: The reward has matured and is queued for the next payment cycle.
• Pending Payout: The total amount across Maturing + Ready stages.
• Total Paid: Lifetime earnings that have already been sent to your wallet.

Cryptocurrency transactions are irreversible. If you set an incorrect address and a payout is sent, those funds cannot be recovered.

To update your payout address: open your wallet panel, authenticate with your PIN, and update the coin address before your balance matures. Always double-check your address — paste it, don't type it.

Merge mining (AuxPoW) lets a SHA-256 miner simultaneously mine multiple coins without any extra hardware or electricity cost. The same proof of work that tries to find a Bitcoin block is also valid for finding Namecoin and Fractal Bitcoin blocks.

BCMonster automatically handles merge mining for BTC miners. When you mine BTC on BCMonster, you're simultaneously mining NMC and FB. If your work meets the difficulty for those coins, you earn a bonus block reward on top of your BTC earnings.

1. Make sure you're mining BTC on BCMonster (merge mining only works for BTC miners)
2. Get a Namecoin (NMC) address from Namecoin Core
3. Get a Fractal Bitcoin (FB) address from the Fractal Bitcoin wallet
4. Open your BCMonster wallet panel and navigate to Merge Mining Addresses
5. Add your NMC and FB addresses — payouts will flow automatically when blocks are found

Important: a merge-mined block can only pay one address, and that address is fixed when the block is built — before we know who found it. If you haven't registered an NMC or FB address at the time a block is found, that block's reward is kept by the pool as pool revenue. This is not credited retroactively: registering later starts your payouts from that point forward but does not recover rewards from blocks found earlier. Register your NMC and FB addresses before you mine so nothing is left on the table.

NMC and FB are merge-mined — they don't have their own stratum ports or separate worker entries. Your BTC worker IS your NMC and FB worker simultaneously.

Merge coin earnings appear in your wallet panel under the NMC and FB sections, not as separate worker rows. The workers page only shows coins with direct stratum connections.

Yes — BCMonster also runs a Verus (VRSC) pool on the VerusHash algorithm (CPU, GPU and Verus ASIC friendly), with the same choice you get on every BCMonster coin: solo mining or pool mining, each on its own dedicated ports, 1.5% fee either way.

CHIPS, vARRR and vDEX are independent blockchains launched on Verus's PBaaS (Public Blockchains as a Service). Because they use VerusHash too, every VRSC share you submit is simultaneously a candidate block on all three — the Verus daemon merge-mines them for you. When your share beats one of their targets, that block's full reward is credited to you on top of your VRSC earnings, at no extra hashrate or cost.

• One VRSC address (starts with R) receives VRSC, CHIPS, vARRR and vDEX — all four share the Verus address format.
• Use Verus Desktop (Windows/macOS/Linux) or Verus Mobile (iPhone/Android) — both hold all four coins. Links are in the Wallets section above.
• Your Verus worker page shows a Merge-Mined Payouts card with each coin's pending and paid totals, and the Blocks page lists every CHIPS/vARRR/vDEX block under the Verus tab.

Connect: stratum+tcp://bcmonster.com:1900 (pool) or 1999 (solo) for CPUs and small rigs; 1901 / 1998 for NiceHash, Mining Rig Rentals and big rigs. Username is your VRSC address (starts with R). More in the Verus FAQ.

BIP-54 is the "Great Consensus Cleanup" — a Bitcoin soft fork proposal that fixes several long-standing edge cases in the protocol. Its main goals are to fix the timewarp attack (a way to manipulate block timestamps to lower difficulty), reduce the worst-case time it takes to validate a block, prevent certain Merkle tree weaknesses, and eliminate the possibility of duplicate transactions.

For miners and pools, the most relevant piece is a new rule about how the coinbase transaction (the special first transaction in every block that pays the miner) must be constructed.

Yes. BCMonster is already producing BIP-54-compliant blocks today. We've updated our coinbase construction so that every block we build sets the coinbase transaction's nLockTime to the block height minus 1, exactly as BIP-54 requires, with the input sequence left non-final so the locktime is consensus-enforced.

This puts BCMonster in the same camp as forward-thinking pools like MARA Pool and ViaBTC, which already mine BIP-54-style coinbase transactions.

BIP-54 requires that the coinbase transaction's timelock field be set to a specific value rather than the traditional zero:

• nLockTime = block height − 1. Previously this field was simply 0 on most pools' coinbase transactions.
• The coinbase input sequence stays non-final. A locktime only has any effect if at least one input is "non-final," so this pairing is what makes the rule actually enforceable.

It's a small, surgical change — just a few bytes in the coinbase — but it has to be done by the pool software, because Bitcoin Core itself does not build the coinbase transaction. That's the pool's job.

Only partially. BIP-54 has several parts. The pieces about block timestamps (the timewarp fix) are handled by the node — Bitcoin Core version 29.0 and later won't even build a block template that violates the new timestamp rules, and BCMonster runs Bitcoin Core 31.0, so that side is covered automatically.

But the coinbase nLockTime rule is different, because the coinbase transaction is assembled by the pool software, not by the node. Bitcoin Core hands the pool a block template; the pool builds the coinbase. So this is the one part of BIP-54 that every pool has to implement itself — and BCMonster already has.

Not yet. BIP-54 has been finalized as a proposal but does not currently have activation parameters set, so there is no live signaling window on mainnet and the new rules are not yet enforced by consensus.

Importantly, BCMonster's BIP-54 coinbase is valid under today's rules — setting nLockTime to height−1 with a non-final sequence is perfectly acceptable to current Bitcoin Core. So enabling it early changes nothing about how our blocks are accepted now; it simply means we won't have to scramble to update anything when activation eventually happens.

No — you don't need to do anything. BIP-54 compliance is entirely on the pool side. Your miner connects exactly the same way, your hashrate counts the same, payouts work the same, and your hardware needs no changes or firmware updates.

The only thing that changed is the internal structure of the coinbase transaction in blocks BCMonster finds. If you ever inspect one of our blocks on a block explorer, you'll notice the coinbase locktime equals the block height minus one — that's BIP-54 in action.

No. The BIP-54 change touches one specific part of the Bitcoin coinbase (the locktime), while the merged-mining commitments for Fractal Bitcoin and Namecoin live in a completely separate part of the coinbase. They don't overlap, so AuxPoW merge mining is entirely unaffected and continues to work normally.

BIP-54 is also a Bitcoin rule specifically. Other chains have their own consensus roadmaps, so this is about keeping BCMonster's Bitcoin blocks forward-compatible.

Both modes are available on every coin — you pick per connection with your miner's password (x = pool, m=solo = solo). Here's how each pays:

Pool mining (password x): You share work with other BCMonster pool miners on that coin. When any pool miner finds a block, the reward is split PPLNS — in proportion to the shares each miner contributed over the last N shares, counted back from the block rather than from the start of a round. More consistent, smaller payouts.

Solo mining (password m=solo): You compete on your own. If your miner finds the block, you keep the entire block reward (minus the 1.5% fee) — you don't share it with anyone. Long stretches of nothing, but one win pays the full block.

Your probability of finding a Bitcoin block is: your hashrate ÷ network hashrate.

At current Bitcoin network difficulty (~1 ZH/s), a 100 TH/s ASIC would find a block on average once every ~100,000 years solo. But that doesn't mean it won't happen in the next 10 minutes — mining is random.

This is why coins with lower network difficulty are more interesting for small miners:

• DigiByte (DGB) — ~15 second blocks, lower difficulty. Much better odds.
• Peercoin (PPC) — smaller network, better solo odds.
• BC2 / BCH2 — very low difficulty, realistic for even small ASICs.

Your worker dashboard shows your current expected time to block for your selected coin.

The One Shot Olympics is BCMonster's leaderboard for small "lottery" miners — NerdMiners, Bitaxe, NMiner, JingleMiner, GoldShell, and any miner submitting shares above the minimum threshold.

Even if your tiny miner never finds a block, your best share ever submitted is tracked forever. The closer your best share is to network difficulty, the higher you rank. It's a fun way to track how lucky you've been without actually winning the jackpot.

Mining is the process of securing the Bitcoin network by solving a cryptographic puzzle. Miners repeatedly hash a block of transactions with a random number (nonce) until the result meets a target (difficulty). The first miner to find a valid hash wins the right to add that block to the blockchain and claims the block reward.

Think of it like a giant lottery where you buy tickets by doing math. More hashrate = more tickets per second = better chances. The difficulty automatically adjusts so blocks are found roughly every 10 minutes (for Bitcoin), regardless of total network hashrate.

SHA-256 (Secure Hash Algorithm 256-bit) is the cryptographic function used to secure Bitcoin and many other coins. It takes any input and produces a 256-bit output in a way that's easy to verify but practically impossible to reverse.

Because Bitcoin uses SHA-256, any hardware optimized for SHA-256 (an ASIC) can mine all SHA-256 coins, including everything on BCMonster. That's why a single Antminer can mine BTC, BCH, DGB, PPC, and more — they all use the same math.

Hashrate measures how many SHA-256 calculations your miner performs per second:

• H/s — hashes per second (very slow, old USB miners)
• KH/s — kilohashes = 1,000 H/s
• MH/s — megahashes = 1,000,000 H/s
• GH/s — gigahashes = 1 billion H/s
• TH/s — terahashes = 1 trillion H/s (modern ASICs)
• PH/s — petahashes = 1,000 TH/s (large mining farms)
• EH/s — exahashes = 1,000,000 TH/s (Bitcoin network total)

A NerdMiner runs at about 50-80 KH/s. A Bitaxe runs at ~500 GH/s. A modern Antminer S21 runs at ~200 TH/s. The entire Bitcoin network runs at over 1 ZH/s (zettahash = 1 billion TH/s).

The block reward varies by coin and changes over time due to halvings:

• BTC: 3.125 BTC per block (~$180,000+ at current prices)
• BCH: 3.125 BCH per block
• DGB: ~250 DGB per block (drops ~1%/month)
• PPC: ~37-39 PPC per block (PoS hybrid, varies)
• BCH2: 50 BCH2 per block
• BC2: Variable

Plus transaction fees included in the block. BCMonster takes a small percentage as its fee, and the remainder goes directly to your wallet.

Profitability depends entirely on your electricity cost, hardware efficiency, and current coin prices. For large ASICs at commercial electricity rates, mining can be profitable. For home miners paying retail electricity, it's often a break-even or slight loss on major coins like BTC.

However, BCMonster is designed for the thrill of solo mining — the lottery aspect. Many miners run Bitaxes and NerdMiners as a hobby, similar to buying a lottery ticket, while knowing the math doesn't strictly favor them.

Mining difficulty is a number that controls how hard it is to find a valid block hash. It adjusts automatically so blocks are found at a consistent rate regardless of total network hashrate.

Bitcoin adjusts every 2016 blocks (~2 weeks). If blocks were found faster than 10 minutes, difficulty goes up. Slower than 10 minutes, it goes down. This self-regulating mechanism keeps Bitcoin's monetary issuance schedule predictable no matter how many miners join or leave.

The dashboard updates every ~15 seconds and only shows miners that have submitted at least one share. Check:

1. Confirm your username is your wallet address (not an email or username)
2. Make sure you're using the correct coin's port — BTC address on BTC port, PPC address on PPC port, etc.
3. Verify your miner shows "Accepted" shares in its own interface — if it's showing "Rejected" or "Stale", the connection is working but your shares aren't valid
4. Search for your address on the dashboard manually using the search box
5. Wait 2-3 minutes after connecting — very slow miners may take time to submit a first share

Some rejection is normal (1-3%). High rejection rates (>5%) suggest:

• Network latency — choose a stratum server geographically closer. High ping = more stale shares.
• Wrong port for your hashrate — if you're submitting shares too fast for the standard port, try the Pro port with higher starting difficulty.
• Miner firmware — outdated firmware can cause compatibility issues. Update your ASIC firmware.
• Fast-block coins — DigiByte has ~15 second blocks. If your connection latency is high, stale shares increase. BCMonster's Stratum smoothing proxy helps with this.

Pool-reported hashrate is calculated from accepted shares over time, which is inherently statistical. It naturally varies and takes time to converge on your true hashrate. This is normal:

• The 60M Avg column is most reliable — it averages over 60 minutes.
• Current hashrate fluctuates heavily minute-to-minute, especially for slower miners.
• Rejected/stale shares reduce your effective pool hashrate.
• Very high difficulty (Pro port) means fewer shares per unit time, so the estimate is less frequent.

If your 24h average is consistently 20%+ below your miner's rated hashrate, check for rejected shares or hardware issues.

Payouts are not instant — there are required waiting periods:

1. Check the block on your dashboard. Is it showing as "Pending" or "Confirmed"? Pending means it's still maturing.
2. Confirm your payout wallet address is registered correctly in your wallet panel.
3. BTC takes ~16 hours of maturity (100 blocks). PPC takes ~3.5 days (500 blocks).
4. After maturity, the payment processor runs automatically. Payouts may take up to 30 minutes after maturity.
5. If your dashboard shows "Total Paid" has increased but your wallet hasn't received it, double-check you're looking at the right address and the correct blockchain explorer.

Still stuck? Hit us up in chat or email BCMonster@BCMonster.com.

Your PIN is tied to your wallet address. PINs are stored as hashed values — BCMonster cannot recover them for you.

However, since your wallet address is public, your mining history and earned balances are always visible on the dashboard. Contact BCMonster via chat or email to request a PIN reset — you'll need to prove ownership of the wallet address (e.g. sign a message with your private key).

Try these steps:

1. Hard refresh the page (Ctrl+Shift+R / Cmd+Shift+R) to clear cached JavaScript
2. Disable browser extensions — ad blockers sometimes interfere with chat APIs
3. Check your browser console (F12) for error messages and include them if you report the issue
4. Try a different browser to isolate browser-specific issues

If the issue persists, email BCMonster@BCMonster.com with your browser and OS version.

Cryptocurrency mining is the process of verifying transactions on a blockchain network and adding them to the public ledger. Miners compete to solve a cryptographic puzzle — the first to solve it earns the right to add the next block and claim the block reward (newly created coins) plus transaction fees from that block.

Mining serves two purposes: it creates new coins in a decentralized way (no central authority prints them) and it secures the network by making it computationally expensive to alter transaction history.

Here's the core loop that every SHA-256 miner runs billions of times per second:

1. Take a block of pending transactions from the network
2. Add a random number called a nonce
3. Run everything through SHA-256 (twice for Bitcoin)
4. Check if the resulting hash starts with enough leading zeros to meet the current difficulty target
5. If not — increment the nonce and try again. If yes — you found a block!

The genius of this system is that hashing is asymmetric: easy to verify (anyone can check the result in milliseconds) but hard to produce (requires trillions of guesses). This is why it's called "Proof of Work" — the valid hash is cryptographic proof that you did the work.

Yes — and BCMonster is built exactly for this. Home mining is alive and well, especially for:

• SHA-256 lottery mining on low-difficulty coins (DGB, PPC, BCH2, BC2) where a home ASIC has realistic odds of finding a block
• NerdMiners and Bitaxes — silent, low-power devices that run 24/7 for a few watts and swing for Bitcoin block rewards
• Miners who own their hardware outright and have cheap or free electricity (solar, off-peak rates)

Bitcoin itself is now dominated by industrial farms, but BCMonster's multi-coin approach means you can mine coins where your hardware has much better odds. A single Antminer S19 has a realistic chance of finding blocks on Peercoin or Bitcoin Cash II.

It depends heavily on three factors: electricity price, hardware efficiency, and current coin prices. The general rule:

• Under $0.06/kWh: Modern ASICs can be very profitable mining BTC
• $0.06–$0.12/kWh: Breakeven to slight profit on efficient hardware. Altcoins on BCMonster can outperform BTC here.
• Above $0.12/kWh: Challenging for pure profit. Many home miners treat it as a hobby or hedge — converting electricity into coins they believe will appreciate.

Your earnings depend on your hashrate relative to the network. The formula: (Your Hashrate ÷ Network Hashrate) × Block Reward × Blocks Per Day.

Example at current Bitcoin network hashrate (~945 EH/s):

• 100 TH/s Antminer: ~0.0000001 BTC per day (~$0.006 before electricity)
• 10 PH/s farm: ~0.001 BTC per day (~$60 before electricity)

This is why lower-difficulty coins on BCMonster are attractive for small miners — the same 100 TH/s that earns fractions of a penny on Bitcoin per day could realistically find a Peercoin block worth $8–$10 every few weeks.

At current Bitcoin network hashrate (~945 EH/s) and 144 blocks/day, a single 100 TH/s miner would statistically take about 200,000+ years to find a full Bitcoin block solo. In pool mining, that same miner earns proportional fractions of blocks continuously — roughly $0.006/day in BTC before electricity.

This is exactly why BCMonster also mines lower-difficulty coins like Peercoin, DigiByte, BC2, and BCH2 — where the same hardware has a realistic shot at a full block reward in days or weeks rather than geological timescales.

BCMonster mines SHA-256 algorithm coins. Your hardware options:

• ASIC miners — dedicated hardware designed only for SHA-256. Antminer, Whatsminer, Canaan, Bitaxe. Most efficient option by far.
• NerdMiner / ESP32 lottery miners — tiny Wi-Fi connected boards running ~50-80 KH/s. Plug in, set up once, leave running forever. More of a hobby than a profit engine.
• GPU (not recommended) — GPUs are 1000× less efficient than ASICs on SHA-256. Not viable.
• CPU (not viable) — CPUs on SHA-256 produce less hashrate than some USB miners from 2013.

Technically yes, practically no. A high-end RTX 4090 GPU produces about 500–800 MH/s on SHA-256 — while a $200 Antminer S9 from 2017 produces 14,000,000 MH/s (14 TH/s). ASICs beat GPUs on SHA-256 by a factor of 10,000–50,000× in hashrate per watt.

GPUs excel at other algorithms like Ethash (Ethereum Classic), Kawpow (Ravencoin), or Autolykos (Ergo) — but BCMonster only supports SHA-256 coins, so an ASIC is the right tool here.

For SHA-256 coins on BCMonster — no. A modern CPU produces ~2–5 MH/s on SHA-256. The Bitcoin network's total hashrate is over 1 ZH/s = 1,000,000,000,000 MH/s. Your CPU's contribution would be so small it wouldn't register on any meaningful timescale.

CPUs can still mine other algorithms profitably (Monero via RandomX is CPU-friendly), but that's not what BCMonster supports. For BCMonster you need an ASIC, even a cheap used one.

ASIC stands for Application-Specific Integrated Circuit. Unlike a CPU or GPU which can run any software, an ASIC chip is hardwired at the silicon level to do one thing only — in this case, SHA-256 double-hashing as fast as possible.

This specialization is why ASICs are so dominant: a chip optimized for one algorithm can be 10,000× more efficient than a general-purpose processor doing the same work. The tradeoff is that an SHA-256 ASIC is useless for anything other than SHA-256 mining.

Popular ASIC brands for SHA-256: Bitmain Antminer (S series), MicroBT Whatsminer (M series), Canaan Avalon. Open-source hardware like the Bitaxe uses repurposed ASIC chips in a hobbyist-friendly form factor.

Mining is legal in most countries including the United States, Canada, most of Europe, and Australia. A small number of countries have restricted or banned it — notably China (2021), though enforcement varies.

In jurisdictions where it's legal, mining income is typically treated as taxable income at the fair market value when received. Consult a local tax professional for advice specific to your situation — BCMonster is not a tax advisor.

A mining pool is a group of miners who combine their hashrate and share block rewards proportionally. Instead of each miner independently trying to find a block (which could take thousands of years for a small miner), the pool collectively finds blocks much more frequently and distributes the reward based on each miner's contribution.

BCMonster is unique in that it offers both pool mining (shared rewards) and solo mining (full reward to the finder) through the same infrastructure — you just change your password field to switch between them.

The main reason is variance reduction. Mining is probabilistic — even if you "should" find a block every 6 months statistically, in reality you might go 2 years without one, or find two in a week. Pool mining smooths this out by giving you small, frequent rewards.

For high-difficulty coins like Bitcoin where a solo find might take centuries, pool mining is the only practical option for small miners. For lower-difficulty coins on BCMonster (DGB, PPC, BCH2, BC2), solo mining becomes much more reasonable even for home hardware.

These are different methods pools use to calculate your share of each block reward:

• PPS (Pay Per Share) — you get paid for every valid share submitted, regardless of whether the pool actually finds a block. The pool takes on the variance risk. Fees are usually higher to compensate.
• PPLNS (Pay Per Last N Shares) — BCMonster's method. Rewards are distributed across your shares in the last N shares before a block was found, where N is a fixed amount of work rather than a round boundary. Because the window always looks back over the same amount of work, it cannot be gamed by joining and leaving around block finds, and it rewards miners who stay connected.
• PROP (Proportional) — each miner receives a share of the block reward proportional to their contribution during the current round, with rounds resetting each time a block is found. Simple, but a round that opens after a long gap is worth more per share than one opening right after a block, which makes it worth hopping between pools. BCMonster used PROP until 2026-10-08.
• FPPS (Full Pay Per Share) — like PPS but also includes your proportional share of transaction fees, not just the block subsidy. Common on large pools.

BCMonster uses PPLNS for pool mining — your payout = (your shares in the window ÷ total shares in the window) × block reward, minus pool fee. The window is N = 2 × network difficulty worth of shares, counted back from the block. Solo ports are unaffected: a solo block still pays its finder the whole reward minus the fee.

BCMonster charges a flat 1.5% on all coins — pool and solo. For context, the major pools charge:

• Foundry USA: 0% (but FPPS model includes hidden spread)
• AntPool: 0–2% depending on model
• ViaBTC: 2–4%
• F2Pool: 2.5%
• SlushPool (Braiins): 2%

Fees aren't the only factor — consider the pool's payout model, server stability, coin selection, and feature set. BCMonster's 1.5% flat fee includes multi-coin support, merge mining, the One Shot Olympics leaderboard, and infrastructure that's been running since 2016.

Payouts are triggered automatically after each block matures. BCMonster doesn't hold funds on a daily/weekly cycle — once a block matures (100 confirmations on every coin here except Peercoin, which needs 500), the payment processor runs and sends funds within minutes.

This means if you find a block today, you'll see the payout in your wallet within hours on most coins. Peercoin is the exception: its 500-block maturity is roughly 3-4 days.

On BCMonster, balance only increases when a block is found. This is different from large pools where you accumulate tiny daily fractions. Check:

• Are blocks being found? Check the Blocks page or block ticker at the top for recent pool blocks.
• Is your miner connected? Your worker should show as Online on the dashboard.
• Are your shares being counted? Round Shares on your dashboard should be increasing.
• Is your payout address registered? Without a registered wallet address, payouts can't be sent.

If everything looks correct but no blocks have been found recently, patience is the answer — mining is probabilistic.

Workers are shown as "Offline" rather than removed when they disconnect. If a worker has been offline for an extended period with zero activity, it may eventually fall off the active list. Common causes:

• Miner lost power or internet connection
• Miner was reconfigured to a different pool or coin
• Router IP changed and the stratum connection dropped
• Miner firmware crashed (check miner's own interface)

The "Last seen" timestamp on your dashboard tells you when the worker last submitted a share. Your mining history and best shares are permanently preserved regardless of online/offline status.

The core formula: Daily Profit = (Daily Coin Earnings × Coin Price) − Daily Electricity Cost

To get daily coin earnings: (Your Hashrate ÷ Network Hashrate) × Daily Block Reward × Blocks Per Day

Electricity cost: Power Draw (kW) × Hours Per Day × Price Per kWh

Useful online calculators that source live data:

• WhatToMine.com — comprehensive multi-coin profitability calculator
• Minerstat.com — hardware database with profitability estimates
• f2pool mining profit calculator

For Bitcoin mining with a modern efficient ASIC (e.g. Antminer S21 at ~17 J/TH):

• <$0.05/kWh: Highly profitable
• $0.05–$0.08/kWh: Profitable
• $0.08–$0.10/kWh: Marginal — depends heavily on BTC price
• >$0.10/kWh: Likely unprofitable on BTC at current prices

For lower-difficulty altcoins on BCMonster (DGB, PPC, BC2, BCH2), these thresholds are more generous because block rewards come more frequently relative to your hashrate. A miner that loses money on BTC per day might still profit mining Peercoin.

Profitability depends on efficiency (J/TH), purchase price, and current coin prices. In 2026, leading SHA-256 ASICs include:

• Antminer S21 Pro — ~234 TH/s at ~15 J/TH. Top-tier efficiency.
• Whatsminer M60S+ — ~186 TH/s at ~17.5 J/TH. Reliable workhorses.
• Antminer S19 XP — ~140 TH/s at ~21.5 J/TH. Good used market value.
• Canaan Avalon A1566 — ~185 TH/s. Air-cooled, competitive efficiency.

For BCMonster's multi-coin approach, older generation machines (S17, S19) are often excellent value — their lower BTC profitability is offset by better relative odds on lower-difficulty coins.

ROI (Return on Investment) = Hardware cost ÷ Daily net profit = Days to break even.

Example: A miner costs $2,000 and earns $5/day net after electricity → ROI = 400 days (~13 months).

The catch: network difficulty, coin prices, and electricity costs all change over time. A 400-day ROI projection made today could turn into 200 days (if BTC price doubles) or never (if difficulty spikes). Real ROI calculations should model multiple price/difficulty scenarios.

For BCMonster miners targeting altcoins, a single block find can dramatically accelerate ROI — a Peercoin block win on a 100 TH/s miner pays ~$9 in one shot, which might be a week's worth of daily pool earnings.

This is the fundamental question every miner faces. The honest answer: purely from a return-on-capital perspective, buying Bitcoin directly has outperformed mining for most retail participants over the past few years, due to difficulty growth outpacing hardware efficiency gains.

However, mining has real advantages that pure buying doesn't:

• Cost basis privacy — mining income is harder to trace than exchange purchases
• No exchange counterparty risk — you mine directly to your own wallet
• Operational cash flow — mining generates ongoing coin income rather than a lump-sum purchase
• Network participation — you're actively securing the coins you believe in
• It's genuinely fun — many BCMonster miners are hobbyists who enjoy the process

A share is a proof that your miner is working — it's a hash result that meets a lower difficulty target than a full network block, but proves your hardware is genuinely doing SHA-256 work.

Think of it like a lottery: the network difficulty is like needing a ticket number below 1,000. A share is like needing a number below 1,000,000 — easier to hit, but still proves you're buying tickets. The pool collects your shares to calculate your contribution, and when someone hits the real target (below 1,000), the pool splits the prize based on shares submitted.

Your best share ever is the closest any of your shares has come to meeting actual network difficulty — BCMonster tracks this on the One Shot Olympics leaderboard.

A stale share is a valid share that was submitted after a new block was already found — either by your pool, another pool, or the network. Because the blockchain has already moved to the next block, your share is working on an outdated block template and can't be credited.

Stale shares are caused by network latency between your miner and the pool server. When a new block is found, the pool has to propagate the new job to all connected miners. Miners with high latency (high ping) continue submitting work on the old job for a brief window, producing stale shares.

BCMonster's Stratum smoothing proxy helps reduce stale rates on fast-block coins like DigiByte (15-second blocks).

Stale shares are valid work submitted too late — the hash is correct but the block template is outdated.

Invalid shares are shares where the hash itself is wrong — the miner claims to have found a valid hash but when the pool verifies it, the hash doesn't meet the required difficulty. This indicates:

• Hardware errors — damaged ASIC chips producing incorrect hash results
• Overclocking too aggressively — pushing chips beyond stable frequencies
• Firmware bugs — software incorrectly constructing the block header
• Memory errors — bad RAM or flash corrupting computation

A small invalid rate (<1%) is normal. High invalid rates (>3%) usually mean a failing chip or unstable overclock.

Stratum is the standard communication protocol between miners and pools. Introduced by Slush Pool in 2012, it replaced the older getwork protocol and is now used by virtually every mining pool and ASIC.

Stratum uses a persistent TCP connection over which the pool pushes new block templates to the miner (mining.notify) and the miner submits completed shares (mining.submit). The connection stays alive rather than polling, which is much more efficient.

The URL format you see on BCMonster — stratum+tcp://bcmonster.com:3333 — tells your miner to connect via TCP using the Stratum protocol to bcmonster.com on port 3333.

Pool luck measures whether a block was found faster or slower than statistically expected. It's expressed as a percentage:

• 100% luck — found exactly when expected (1 full round's worth of shares)
• 200% luck — took twice as long as expected (unlucky)
• 50% luck — found in half the expected time (lucky)

Luck averages to 100% over time — it's pure probability. Short-term luck swings of 50–300% are completely normal and don't reflect anything about your miner's performance or the pool's operation.

The coinbase transaction is the first transaction in every block — it creates new coins and sends them to the miner who found the block. It contains no inputs (coins come from nowhere — this is how new Bitcoin is created) and outputs the block reward to the pool's address.

The extranonce is extra space in the coinbase transaction that miners can vary to expand their search space. A standard 32-bit nonce gives 4 billion combinations — modern ASICs exhaust this in milliseconds. The extranonce lets miners vary the coinbase itself, effectively creating a fresh set of 4 billion nonces to search through. BCMonster handles extranonce allocation automatically via Stratum.

An orphan (or stale) block happens when two miners find valid blocks at nearly the same time. Both are valid, but the network can only accept one — the blockchain forks briefly, then the longer chain wins and the other block is "orphaned." The miner of the orphaned block receives no reward.

This is rare (<0.1% of blocks on Bitcoin) and more likely on coins with very fast block times. BCMonster monitors for orphans and will show the block as orphaned in your dashboard if it occurs. It's one of the few outcomes in mining where you do the work and receive nothing — luck of the network.

The mempool (memory pool) is the queue of unconfirmed transactions waiting to be included in a block. Miners select transactions from the mempool to include in their block template, prioritizing those with higher fee rates (satoshis per byte).

When the mempool is congested (high demand for block space), transaction fees spike and miners earn significantly more per block — sometimes more than the block subsidy itself. When the mempool is empty, blocks might contain almost no fee income.

BCMonster includes available transaction fees in your block reward automatically. Your dashboard shows the full reward including fees when a block is found.

Yes, in two ways:

Stale shares: Higher latency between your miner and BCMonster's servers means more stale shares. BCMonster is hosted in North America — miners nearby will have lower ping and fewer stales. The practical impact is usually under 1% for miners within the same continent.

Block propagation: When any miner on the network finds a block, that information propagates globally. Miners geographically distant from major mining centers receive the new block template slightly later, causing brief periods of wasted work. This is a minor effect on solo mining but matters more in competitive pool mining.

BCMonster is built for a specific type of miner — one who wants more than just hashing toward an industrial-scale pool. Key differentiators:

• Multi-coin — one pool, 8 SHA-256 coins. Switch coins without changing your hardware.
• Solo + Pool — run both simultaneously across different workers, one password field away from switching.
• Free merge mining — mine NMC and FB for free alongside BTC, zero extra configuration.
• NerdMiner & small miner native — dedicated lottery ports built for low-hashrate ESP32 miners. Bitaxe connects via Standard ports as a proper small ASIC.
• Running since 2016 — 298+ BTC mined lifetime (verified on-chain). We're not going anywhere.
• Live community — real-time chat, leaderboards, block notifications, no anonymous pool operator.
• AsicBoost free — BIP310 version rolling enabled automatically on all ports.

Bitcoin Cash II (BCH2) is a SHA-256 proof-of-work cryptocurrency with a 50 BCH2 block reward and relatively low network difficulty compared to BTC and BCH. This makes it one of the most realistic coins for solo block finds on BCMonster — a home ASIC has genuinely good odds of finding BCH2 blocks.

BCH2 mining on BCMonster uses port 8888 (Standard) or 8889 (Pro) with your BCH2 wallet address as the username.

You need to change three things when switching coins: the stratum port, your wallet address (username), and make sure your wallet is registered for that coin in BCMonster's wallet panel. The stratum hostname (bcmonster.com) stays the same.

The Quick Connect button on the dashboard shows the exact URL and settings for every coin — copy the stratum URL and paste it directly into your miner's configuration.

Many miners run multiple workers on multiple coins simultaneously — one ASIC on BTC, another on DGB, another on PPC — all pointed at BCMonster.

BCMonster provides several monitoring views:

• Dashboard (index.html) — enter your wallet address to see your miner snapshot: hashrate, shares, best share, pending payout, total paid.
• Worker page (worker.html) — deep dive per-worker stats, hashrate chart, round progress, payment history.
• Workers grid (workers.html) — pop-out table of all your workers across all coins.
• Leaderboards — see how your hashrate and shares compare to other miners on the pool.
• Block notifications — enable Alerts in the header to receive browser notifications when the pool finds a block.

Your best share is the highest-difficulty share you've ever submitted to BCMonster — the closest you've come to actually finding a block. It's measured in the same units as network difficulty (G, M, etc.).

A best share of 8.65 G on Bitcoin means your miner produced a hash worth 8.65 billion in difficulty — and Bitcoin's network difficulty is ~124 T (trillion). You were about 14,000× away from a block find at that moment.

View your best share on your worker dashboard. Pool-wide best shares are on the Best Share Leaderboard. The One Shot Olympics tracks best shares specifically for small ESP32 miners.

This is a statistical estimate of how long it would take your current hashrate to find a solo block at current network difficulty. It's calculated as:

Expected Time = Network Difficulty × 2^32 ÷ Your Hashrate (H/s)

Important: this is a mean (average) of an exponential distribution. It means you're as likely to find a block before that time as after it — roughly 63% of the time you'll find it within the expected time if you mine continuously. It's not a countdown or a guarantee.

Pool-reported hashrate is estimated from shares submitted over time — it's inherently statistical. The "current" hashrate is a short window estimate that naturally jumps around. This is normal and expected.

The 60-minute average is much more stable and is the best indicator of your true hashrate. The 24-hour average is even smoother. If your 24H average consistently shows 20%+ less than your miner reports, investigate hardware or connection issues. But if your 60M average is close to your miner's rated speed, everything is working correctly.

BCMonster's dashboard auto-refreshes every 15 seconds, so you'll see natural statistical fluctuation on every update. Don't panic if the current hashrate shows zero briefly — it just means no shares arrived in that particular window.

It depends on your goals and budget:

• Best odds on altcoins (budget pick): Used Antminer S9 or S17 (~$50–$200). Low wattage relative to hashrate, good for Peercoin/DGB/BC2/BCH2 where difficulty is low enough that even older hardware competes.
• Best efficiency for BTC: Antminer S21 Pro or Whatsminer M60S+. Expensive but lowest J/TH for maximum profitability at higher electricity costs.
• Best home miner (quiet): Antminer S19j Pro or Canaan AvalonMini. Slightly less noisy than top-tier industrial machines.
• Best hobby/lottery ASIC: Bitaxe Ultra or Gamma. Open-source, ~500 GH/s, silent, runs on USB power. Uses a real BM1366/BM1368 ASIC chip — connect via Standard ports (3333), not the lottery ports.

Industrial ASICs are very loud — comparable to a vacuum cleaner or jet engine at close range:

• Antminer S19 series: ~75–82 dB at 1 meter. Not suitable for living spaces.
• Whatsminer M30S: ~75 dB. Same category.
• Antminer S9 (older): ~72 dB. Still loud but more manageable.
• Bitaxe / NerdMiner: Nearly silent. No fans, designed for home use.

Industrial ASICs need a dedicated space — garage, shed, basement, or commercial facility. Running one in a bedroom or home office is impractical. Some miners use acoustic enclosures or immersion cooling to reduce noise.

ASIC chips typically run at 60–85°C under load. The exhaust air from a miner can be 50–70°C — enough to heat a small room significantly. Key cooling requirements:

• Adequate airflow: ASICs need to pull in cool air and exhaust hot air freely. Don't restrict airflow or stack machines too close.
• Ambient temperature: Keep the room below 35°C. Higher ambient temperatures reduce chip lifespan and can trigger thermal throttling.
• Fan maintenance: Clean dust from intake fans monthly. Clogged fans are the #1 cause of overheating failures.
• Immersion cooling: Advanced setups submerge ASICs in dielectric fluid for silent, efficient cooling at the cost of upfront investment.

Mining uses very little bandwidth — a single ASIC sends maybe 1–5 KB of data per minute to the pool. A 1 Mbps connection can support hundreds of miners simultaneously.

However, latency matters more than bandwidth. High ping = more stale shares. A 5ms wired connection will always outperform a 50ms Wi-Fi connection even if the Wi-Fi has more raw bandwidth.

For industrial ASICs: wired Ethernet only. The stale share cost of Wi-Fi latency adds up over months of mining.

For NerdMiners and Bitaxes: Wi-Fi is fine and often the only option. The stakes are lower and the devices are designed for Wi-Fi connectivity.

With proper cooling and maintenance, ASIC miners can last 5–10 years or more. The main failure modes are:

• Hash board chip failures — individual ASIC chips burn out over time, reducing total hashrate. Boards can be repaired or replaced.
• Fan failures — fans are consumables. Replace them every 2–3 years proactively.
• Power supply unit (PSU) failures — PSUs can be replaced independently from the hash boards.
• Economic obsolescence — the machine still works but is no longer profitable on BTC due to network difficulty growth. This is why BCMonster's multi-coin approach extends miner economic lifespan — an S9 that's useless on BTC can still find blocks on lower-difficulty coins.

The "best" pool depends entirely on what you're optimizing for:

• Maximum BTC income, large operation: Foundry USA or AntPool — massive hashrate, FPPS payments, institutional-grade infrastructure.
• Multi-coin SHA-256 with solo options: BCMonster — the only pool supporting 8 SHA-256 coins simultaneously with solo mining, merge mining, and NerdMiner-specific ports.
• Privacy-focused: CKPool (solo.ckpool.org) — minimal data collection, direct solo Bitcoin mining.
• Ethereum Classic / GPU coins: Ethermine, 2Miners, Flexpool.
• Monero (CPU mining): SupportXMR, MoneroOcean.

For SHA-256 home miners who want more than just BTC and a soul-crushing estimated-time-to-block — BCMonster is the answer.

Here's the complete path from zero to mining on BCMonster:

1. Choose your coin(s) — decide which SHA-256 coin to mine. For beginners, DGB or BCH2 offer better odds for small miners.
2. Get a wallet — download the official wallet for your chosen coin and generate an address. Write down your seed phrase and keep it safe offline.
3. Get hardware — buy an ASIC miner (Antminer, Whatsminer) or a NerdMiner/Bitaxe for a low-cost start.
4. Connect to BCMonster — open the Quick Connect modal on the dashboard and copy the stratum URL for your coin and tier.
5. Configure your miner — enter the stratum URL, your wallet address as the username, and x (pool) or m=solo (solo) as the password.
6. Register on BCMonster — enter your wallet address in the search bar, open the wallet panel, set a display name and PIN.
7. Monitor and enjoy — watch your hashrate appear on the dashboard, track your shares, and wait for that block find!

It varies enormously by hardware:

• NerdMiner: ~0.5–2W. Costs pennies per month.
• Bitaxe: ~10–20W. ~$1–2/month at $0.10/kWh.
• Antminer S19j Pro (100 TH/s): ~3,050W. ~$22/month at $0.10/kWh.
• Antminer S21 Pro (234 TH/s): ~3,531W. ~$25/month at $0.10/kWh.

The entire Bitcoin network consumes an estimated 120–150 TWh per year — comparable to the electricity consumption of a mid-sized country. This is a feature (makes attacks expensive) as much as a criticism (environmental impact). BCMonster miners running on renewable energy contribute to the growing percentage of Bitcoin mining powered by clean energy.

Not profitably or meaningfully. A modern gaming PC with an RTX 4090 GPU produces maybe 1 GH/s on SHA-256 — versus the Bitcoin network's 1,000,000,000 GH/s (1 EH/s). Your contribution would be 0.000000001% of the network.

You'd consume more in electricity than you'd ever earn in BTC. However:

• You can mine Monero (XMR) profitably with a CPU using RandomX — the algorithm is ASIC-resistant by design.
• You can mine other GPU-friendly algorithms (Ethash, KawPoW) with your GPU.
• For SHA-256 coins on BCMonster, a PC is not the right tool. Even a $50 used Antminer S9 would be 50,000× more effective than your gaming PC's CPU+GPU combined.

Bitcoin

BTC · SHA-256 · 10 min blocks

Network Diff: —
Hashrate: —

Bitcoin was created by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto and launched on January 3, 2009 with the mining of the genesis block — which contained the now-famous message: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks."

The first Bitcoin transaction occurred on January 12, 2009, between Satoshi and Hal Finney. The first real-world purchase was 10,000 BTC for two pizzas on May 22, 2010 — now celebrated annually as "Bitcoin Pizza Day." Satoshi disappeared from public view in late 2010, leaving Bitcoin in the hands of the open-source community.

Bitcoin halves its block reward every 210,000 blocks (~4 years). The most recent halving in April 2024 reduced the reward from 6.25 to 3.125 BTC per block. The next halving is estimated around 2028. There will only ever be 21 million BTC — roughly 19.7 million have been mined as of 2026.

Bitcoin Cash

BCH · SHA-256 · 10 min blocks

Network Diff: —
Hashrate: —

Bitcoin Cash was created on August 1, 2017 via a hard fork of the Bitcoin blockchain at block 478,558. The fork was driven by a longstanding dispute over Bitcoin's block size limit — BCH supporters wanted larger blocks (initially 8 MB, later 32 MB) to enable more transactions per second and lower fees.

Key figures behind BCH included Roger Ver ("Bitcoin Jesus"), Jihan Wu of Bitmain, and Craig Wright. BCH itself later forked again in November 2018 into BCH (ABC) and BSV (Bitcoin SV), following another contentious disagreement.

Despite its lower price than BTC, BCH maintains a significant mining ecosystem, uses the same SHA-256 algorithm, and has an Emergency Difficulty Adjustment (EDA) mechanism that helps it recover from dramatic hashrate swings. It has the same 21 million coin cap and 3.125 BCH block reward as of 2024.

DigiByte

DGB · SHA-256 (+ 4 others) · 15 sec blocks

Network Diff: —
Hashrate: —

DigiByte was founded by Jared Tate and launched on January 10, 2014. It's notable for several technical innovations: 15-second block times (40× faster than Bitcoin), five mining algorithms (SHA-256, Scrypt, Skein, Qubit, Odocrypt), and DigiShield — a real-time difficulty adjustment mechanism later adopted by many other coins including Zcash.

BCMonster mines DGB via the SHA-256 algorithm only. Because DGB blocks are found every 15 seconds, BCMonster uses a Stratum smoothing proxy to prevent aggressive job-switching that would cause ASIC pipeline flushes on fast-block coins.

DigiByte has a supply cap of 21 billion DGB (1,000× Bitcoin's supply) with a block reward that decreases 1% every month. By 2026 approximately 95% of all DGB has been mined. The current block reward is approximately 262 DGB.

Peercoin

PPC · SHA-256 PoW + PoS hybrid · 10 min blocks

Network Diff: —
Hashrate: —

Peercoin was created by the pseudonymous developer Sunny King and launched on August 19, 2012 — making it one of the oldest cryptocurrencies still actively maintained. It was the first cryptocurrency to implement Proof of Stake, a major innovation that inspired countless later projects including Ethereum's post-merge consensus.

Peercoin uses a hybrid PoW/PoS model: SHA-256 mining secures the initial coin distribution (like Bitcoin), while Proof of Stake allows coin holders to mint new blocks by "staking" their holdings. Unlike Bitcoin, Peercoin has no hard supply cap — it inflates at ~1% per year via PoS minting, which Sunny King argued makes it more sustainable long-term.

BCMonster mines Peercoin's Proof-of-Work side only. Notably, PPC requires 500 confirmations before mining rewards can be spent — much longer than Bitcoin's 100. This is why PPC payouts take several days after a block is found. The PoW block reward is currently approximately 37–39 PPC and decreases gradually over time.

Namecoin

NMC · SHA-256 AuxPoW · Merge-mined with BTC

Namecoin was launched on April 18, 2011, making it the first altcoin ever created and the first fork of Bitcoin. Its original purpose was revolutionary: a decentralized DNS system using the .bit domain extension, resistant to censorship and government seizure.

Namecoin pioneered merge mining (AuxPoW) — the technique that allows Bitcoin miners to simultaneously mine Namecoin with no extra energy. This was a genuine technical innovation, and the AuxPoW standard it established is now used by multiple cryptocurrencies including Dogecoin and Syscoin.

On BCMonster, BTC miners automatically merge-mine NMC. Your BTC stratum connection simultaneously submits work to both Bitcoin and Namecoin block templates. When your hash meets Namecoin's difficulty (which is much lower than Bitcoin's), you find an NMC block and earn NMC block rewards — typically around 3.125 NMC per block.

Fractal Bitcoin

FB · SHA-256 · Merge-mined with BTC AND direct-mineable on its own ports · ~30 sec blocks

Network Diff: —
Hashrate: —

Fractal Bitcoin launched in September 2024 as a Bitcoin scaling solution — a separate blockchain that runs the Bitcoin protocol recursively as a second layer. It uses SHA-256 Proof of Work and supports merge mining with Bitcoin, meaning BCMonster BTC miners earn FB rewards for free alongside BTC.

FB uses an AuxPoW mechanism similar to Namecoin but targets much faster block times (~30 seconds). Its network difficulty is dramatically lower than Bitcoin's — currently measured in single-digit G range vs Bitcoin's 124+ T — making merge-mined block finds realistic even for smaller hashrate miners.

BCMonster was an early supporter of Fractal Bitcoin merge mining, implementing the full AuxPoW pipeline in mid-2025. When your BTC stratum work meets FB's lower difficulty, BCMonster automatically submits it to the FB daemon and credits your registered FB wallet.

FB can ALSO be mined directly, with its own dedicated ports separate from BTC — useful if you'd rather point a miner at FB specifically instead of relying on merge-mining. Mine FB directly on ports 5555 (Standard) · 5556 (Pro) · 5559 (Elite) · 9993 (ESP32), plus matching forced-solo ports 5557 / 5558 / 5560. Your username is your FB wallet address, same as any other coin on BCMonster.

Bitcoin II

BC2 · SHA-256 · Lower network difficulty

Network Diff: —
Hashrate: —

Bitcoin II is a SHA-256 proof-of-work cryptocurrency with a significantly lower network difficulty than Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash, making it one of the most accessible coins for solo mining on BCMonster. It follows Bitcoin's core design — UTXO model, SHA-256 mining, fixed supply — with a smaller network footprint.

The lower network difficulty means a home ASIC has genuinely competitive odds of finding a BC2 block. BCMonster has found multiple BC2 blocks, validating it as a practical solo mining target for miners with hashrates in the TH/s range.

Bitcoin Cash II

BCH2 · SHA-256 · 50 BCH2 block reward

Network Diff: —
Hashrate: —

Bitcoin Cash II is a SHA-256 cryptocurrency offering a 50 BCH2 block reward — one of the largest per-block rewards of any coin on BCMonster. Its network difficulty is among the lowest on the pool, which combined with the generous reward makes BCH2 a standout target for solo miners.

BCMonster has found multiple BCH2 blocks including block #67,637 in June 2026, yielding 50 BCH2 — demonstrating that real miners with real hardware win on this coin regularly. The lower difficulty means even a single S19 has realistic odds within days to weeks of continuous mining.

eCash

XEC · SHA-256 · Bitcoin ABC · 2 decimals

Network Diff: —
Hashrate: —

eCash is the Bitcoin ABC continuation of Bitcoin Cash: the same SHA-256d proof-of-work your ASIC already does, with Avalanche post-consensus for near-instant finality and a rebased unit (1 XEC = 100 "satoshis", so a block pays around 1.5 million XEC). Because it's SHA-256, every miner on BCMonster can point at it with no firmware change.

Two things make XEC blocks different under the hood, and the pool handles both for you: every coinbase must pay the network's miner fund (~32%) and a staking reward (~10%) before the miner share, and blocks must beat a real-time target that tightens right after each block. Your payout is the miner share after those, minus the pool's 1.5%.

On every other coin we mine, the rule is simple: beat the network difficulty and you've found a block. eCash is the exception. Since the November 2024 "Heartbeat" upgrade, XEC enforces a Real-Time Target (RTT) — the difficulty you actually have to beat spikes enormously right after each block and then decays back down.

That means the difficulty shown on explorers, on this site, and in third-party monitoring apps is the floor, not the requirement. It's the lowest the bar ever gets, and it only gets that low near the end of a block interval.

A real example from this pool. On 2026-09-20 at 00:17:32 a miner submitted an 8.18 G share on XEC. The published network difficulty was 7.36 G, so it looked like a clear win. But the share landed 314 seconds after the previous block, and at that instant the network required 11.07 G. The share was 73.9% of the real bar. Genuinely excellent work — and correctly not a block.

How the bar moves. The requirement starts astronomically high the moment a block is found and falls off as the fifth power of elapsed time. At a steady ten-minute cadence it settles back to the published difficulty after roughly two minutes. But the algorithm looks at five separate windows — how long since the block 1, 2, 5, 11 and 17 blocks ago — and takes whichever demands the most work. So when recent blocks have come in fast, the bar starts higher and stays elevated much longer. In the example above, five blocks had arrived in 1,377 seconds where they should have taken about 3,000, so the five-block window was still demanding 11 G a full five minutes in.

This is deliberate. It's what stops "switch miners" from pointing enormous rented hashrate at eCash, harvesting a burst of fast blocks, and leaving — which is what made XEC block times so erratic before. Steadier blocks mean steadier confirmations for everyone.

Further reading: eCash Heartbeat upgrade · eCash mining docs

Quai Network is a next-generation Proof-of-Work blockchain that launched on mainnet in October 2024. It represents one of the most technically ambitious PoW designs since Bitcoin — using a sharded multi-chain architecture that runs 13 parallel chains simultaneously, all secured by the same mining infrastructure.

What makes Quai unique:

• ProgPoW algorithm — ASIC-resistant, designed for GPU mining. Unlike SHA-256 coins, Quai is meant to keep GPU miners competitive indefinitely.
• Merged mining across 13 zones — miners simultaneously mine the Prime chain, 3 Region chains, and 9 Zone chains. One miner, multiple reward streams.
• Infinite scalability design — throughput scales linearly by adding more zone chains as demand grows, without hard forks.
• Built-in EVM compatibility — smart contracts work out of the box, making Quai a programmable PoW chain.
• Qi companion token — Quai has a dual-token system: QUAI (store of value, miner reward) and Qi (transactional stablecoin pegged to energy cost of mining).

BCMonster is actively working on Quai Network integration. Because Quai uses ProgPoW rather than SHA-256, it requires dedicated GPU mining infrastructure separate from our existing ASIC pools. When Quai launches on BCMonster, GPU miners will be able to participate alongside our ASIC miners, significantly expanding who can mine on the pool.

The base stratum server is stratum+tcp://bcmonster.com:PORT. The port depends on the coin and the size of the machine — Standard (up to 99 TH/s), Pro (100–499 TH/s and NiceHash/MRR/Braiins rentals), Elite (500+ TH/s) or ESP32 (NerdMiner and other lottery miners). Pool ports, in that order: BTC 3333 · 3334 · 3337 · 9999, BCH 3555 · 3556 · 3559 · 9994, DGB 4444 · 4445 · 4448 · 9996, PPC 1111 · 1112 · 1115 · 9995, BC2 7777 · 7778 · 7781 · 9997, BCH2 8888 · 8889 · 8892 · 9998, XEC 2222 · 2223 · 2226 · 9992, and FB 5555 · 5556 · 5559 · 9993 — FB can also be earned automatically via merge mining on the BTC ports instead, with no separate connection needed. Your username is your wallet address for that coin, and your password is x for pool or m=solo for solo.

Each coin has its own set of stratum ports, and the port decides two things: pool or solo, and the difficulty tier. Pool and solo ports are listed below in the order Standard · Pro · Elite.

• BTC — Pool 3333 · 3334 · 3337 · Solo 3335 · 3336 · 3338 · ESP32 pool 9989 / solo 9999 — Namecoin and Fractal Bitcoin are merge-mined on these ports for free
• BCH — Pool 3555 · 3556 · 3559 · Solo 3557 · 3558 · 3560 · ESP32 pool 9984 / solo 9994
• BCH2 — Pool 8888 · 8889 · 8892 · Solo 8890 · 8891 · 8893 · ESP32 pool 9988 / solo 9998
• BC2 — Pool 7777 · 7778 · 7781 · Solo 7779 · 7780 · 7782 · ESP32 pool 9987 / solo 9997
• DGB — Pool 4444 · 4445 · 4448 · Solo 4446 · 4447 · 4449 · ESP32 pool 9986 / solo 9996
• PPC — Pool 1111 · 1112 · 1115 · Solo 1113 · 1114 · 1116 · ESP32 pool 9985 / solo 9995
• XEC — Pool 2222 · 2223 · 2226 · Solo 2224 · 2225 · 2227 · ESP32 pool 9982 / solo 9992
• FB — Pool 5555 · 5556 · 5559 · Solo 5557 · 5558 · 5560 · ESP32 pool 9983 / solo 9993 — or skip a separate connection and earn FB automatically by mining on the BTC ports

Which tier? Pick by one machine's hashrate: Standard up to 99 TH/s (15s share target), Pro 100-499 TH/s and rentals (30s), Elite 500+ TH/s (starts at 3.5M difficulty, 60s). ESP32 ports are for NerdMiner, NMMiner and other very-low-hashrate lottery miners. Not sure? Open Quick Connect → Help me choose a port and pick your miner. Point your miner at stratum+tcp://bcmonster.com:PORT.

Encrypted (TLS) ports. BTC and BCH Pro and Elite tiers are also available over TLS. Pro: BTC 3443 (pool) / 3444 (solo), BCH 3663 (pool) / 3664 (solo) — same 500K starting difficulty as the plaintext Pro ports. Elite: BTC 3445 (pool) / 3446 (solo), BCH 3667 (pool) / 3668 (solo) — same 3.5M starting difficulty as the plaintext Elite ports. Use the stratum+tls:// scheme and connect by hostname (bcmonster.com), not by IP: the certificate is issued to the hostname, so an IP connection fails validation. Support varies by firmware — LuxOS, BraiinsOS and recent cgminer builds handle it; many stock and older ASIC firmwares have no TLS support at all, in which case use the normal ports, which remain fully supported.

stratum+tcp:// is the standard unencrypted mining protocol used by virtually all ASIC and ESP32 miners. It's what you'll use for BCMonster. Some pools also offer stratum+ssl:// for encrypted connections, but for mining the payload isn't sensitive — your wallet address is public anyway — so plain stratum+tcp is standard and fine.

The most common causes are: a wrong port for your coin, a typo in the stratum URL, a firewall blocking the outbound port, or an invalid wallet address in the username field. Double-check the URL is stratum+tcp://bcmonster.com:PORT with the correct port, your username is a valid address for that coin, and your password is x or m=solo. If it still fails, try a different network to rule out ISP port blocking.

Yes. A stratum proxy that speaks standard stratum v1 will work — it simply relays your miners' shares to BCMonster. This can be useful for aggregating many small miners under one connection or smoothing job delivery to fast-block coins. Just point the proxy's upstream at the correct BCMonster port for your coin.

BCMonster runs standard Stratum V1, which every ASIC and ESP32 miner supports out of the box. Stratum V2 is a newer protocol with encryption and miner-selected transactions, but adoption is still limited and most hardware defaults to V1. V1 with version-rolling AsicBoost is fully supported here.

A stratum job is the block template your miner works on — it includes the current block header, the transactions to include, and the target difficulty. The pool sends a new job whenever a new block appears on the network (so you're not wasting work on a stale block) or periodically to refresh the transaction set. Fast-block coins like DGB send jobs very frequently.

Append a worker name to your address in the username field, separated by a period: YOUR_ADDRESS.workername. For example bc1q....xyz.Antminer1. Each named worker shows up separately on your dashboard so you can tell your rigs apart. If you don't add a name, it shows as default.

Yes — point as many miners as you like at the same wallet address. Give each a unique worker name (address.rig1, address.rig2, etc.) so they appear individually on your dashboard. Their combined hashrate counts toward your total, and rewards go to the single shared address.

Your dashboard appears automatically at bcmonster.com/worker.html?address=YOUR_WALLET once you start mining. You can also enter your address in the search box on the homepage. It shows your live hashrate, best shares, round progress, pending payouts, and per-worker breakdown.

Pool-side hashrate is estimated from the shares you submit over a time window, while your miner reports its raw chip speed. Over short periods these can differ due to mining's natural variance — you might get lucky or unlucky with share timing. Over a longer window (like the 24h average) they converge. A large persistent gap can indicate rejected shares or hardware issues.

Your best share is the highest-difficulty share your miner has ever submitted. Every share your miner finds has a difficulty; occasionally you'll hit an unusually high one by luck. If a share's difficulty ever meets or exceeds the network difficulty, that share is a block. Your best share shows how close you've come to finding a block.

Vardiff (variable difficulty) automatically tunes the share difficulty the pool assigns to your miner based on your hashrate. Faster miners get higher share difficulty (fewer, harder shares); slower miners get lower difficulty (more frequent shares). This keeps share submission at a healthy rate regardless of your hardware, giving smooth hashrate estimates without flooding the pool.

A zero reading usually means the pool hasn't received shares from your miner recently — your miner may have disconnected, lost internet, crashed, or been powered off. Check the miner is online and still pointed at the correct pool. The dashboard needs a steady share flow to show a live hashrate, so a brief dip can also happen during network hiccups.

It depends on your goal. For the best odds of a small miner actually finding a block solo, the low-difficulty coins are most interesting — BC2, BCH2, DGB, and PPC have far smaller networks than Bitcoin. For pool mining with steady payouts, any coin works. Big ASIC owners chasing lottery jackpots often solo-mine BTC. Your dashboard shows an expected-time-to-block per coin to help you decide.

Yes — every coin on BCMonster uses SHA-256, the same algorithm as Bitcoin. Any SHA-256 ASIC (Antminer S19, S21, Bitaxe, Canaan, etc.) or ESP32 miner (NerdMiner) can mine all of them. You just point it at the port for whichever coin you want, using that coin's address.

The coins with the smallest networks give the best odds for a small miner. BC2 and BCH2 have very low difficulty, making them realistic even for modest ASICs. DGB has fast ~15-second blocks. PPC has a smaller network too. Bitcoin, by contrast, has enormous difficulty — solo-finding a BTC block with small hardware is essentially a lottery.

Bitcoin Cash II (BCH2) is a SHA-256 chain in the Bitcoin Cash lineage with a much smaller network than mainline BCH, which makes it far more approachable for small solo miners to find blocks. It's one of the low-difficulty coins BCMonster supports, popular with hobby miners who want a realistic shot at a block.

Bitcoin II (BC2) is a SHA-256 coin with a small network and low difficulty. Like BCH2, it's attractive to small miners because the low difficulty means even modest hardware has a realistic chance of finding blocks, unlike Bitcoin's astronomically high difficulty.

DigiByte (DGB) is an established multi-algorithm blockchain; its SHA-256 chain is one of five mining algorithms. It has fast blocks (~15 seconds) and a smaller SHA-256 difficulty than Bitcoin, so small miners get frequent chances at blocks. It's a long-running, legitimate project popular for solo lottery mining.

Peercoin (PPC) is one of the oldest cryptocurrencies, launched in 2012, and pioneered proof-of-stake. It still has a proof-of-work SHA-256 component that miners can target, with a relatively small network that gives decent solo odds. BCMonster supports mining PPC's proof-of-work blocks.

That depends on your goals and the coin's market value, which changes constantly. Smaller coins are worth less per coin than Bitcoin but are dramatically easier to find blocks on, so a small miner can realistically earn something rather than nothing. Some miners hold the coins hoping they appreciate; others convert to BTC. This isn't financial advice — always check current prices and do your own research.

Yes. Your wallet's receiving address is designed to be public — it's how anyone sends you coins. Using it as your mining username only tells the pool where to send your rewards. Your private key / seed phrase is what must stay secret, and that never touches the pool. Never enter a private key anywhere as a username or password.

The pool only ever knows your public receiving address, which can't be used to spend your funds. Rewards are sent directly to that address. As long as you control the wallet's private keys (use a wallet where you hold the keys, not an exchange), the pool cannot access or move your coins.

No. Exchanges (Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, etc.) often rotate deposit addresses, may not credit mining payouts, and sometimes reject small or frequent deposits — any of which can cause lost funds. Always mine to a wallet where you control the private keys, then transfer to an exchange later if you want to sell.

If the address is invalid, the pool typically rejects the connection so you can't mine to it. If the address is valid but not yours (a typo that happens to be someone else's real address), those coins would go to that person and are generally unrecoverable — blockchain transactions can't be reversed. Always copy-paste your address and double-check it.

When you register your wallet on BCMonster, you set a PIN that links a display name and settings to your address. It protects account features like editing your profile and cross-device sync, so someone can't impersonate your miner name. It does not control your coins — payouts always go to your on-chain address regardless.

Anyone could technically point a miner at your public address, which would add to your hashrate and — for solo — could even find a block that pays you. It can't harm you; at worst it inflates your displayed stats. Registering your wallet with a PIN protects your display name and profile from being changed by others.

Earnings depend on your hashrate, the coin you mine, its current price, your electricity cost, and luck. Pool mining gives small steady amounts proportional to your hashrate; solo mining pays nothing until you find a block, then pays the full block reward. Use your dashboard's estimates and a mining calculator with your power cost to project realistically. This isn't financial advice.

In many jurisdictions, mined cryptocurrency is treated as taxable income at its value when you receive it, and again for capital gains when you sell. Rules vary widely by country and change over time. BCMonster can't give tax advice — consult a qualified tax professional in your jurisdiction and keep records of your payouts and their values.

Two reasons. First, BCMonster takes a flat 1.5% fee from block rewards. Second, in pool mode the reward is split PPLNS-style among all pool miners, so you receive only your share of the round's work — not the whole block. In solo mode you get the full block minus the 1.5% fee.

Dollar values shown on the site are estimates based on current market prices pulled from public price data, multiplied by your coin amounts. Prices are volatile and update periodically, so the displayed value fluctuates. The actual value you realize depends on the price when you eventually sell or convert.

The block reward is the payment a miner receives for finding a valid block. It consists of the block subsidy (newly created coins) plus the transaction fees from the transactions included in that block. On Bitcoin the subsidy halves roughly every four years. Each coin has its own reward schedule.

A halving is a scheduled event where a coin's block subsidy is cut in half, reducing the rate of new coin creation. Bitcoin halves roughly every four years. It affects how many coins per block miners earn on that chain, but doesn't change how BCMonster operates — you'll simply earn the current post-halving reward for whatever coin you mine.

No — your probability of finding a block solo is your hashrate ÷ network hashrate, whether you solo-mine through BCMonster or run your own node. What a solo pool gives you is convenience: BCMonster runs the full node, builds the block, submits it, and handles the payout, so you don't need to maintain infrastructure. The odds are identical; the hassle is not.

Mining runs hardware at sustained load, which generates heat, so good cooling and airflow matter. Quality ASICs are built for continuous operation. The main wear factors are heat and dust, not mining itself — keep temperatures reasonable and clean your equipment. Running hot for long periods shortens lifespan, so ventilation is your friend.

For SHA-256 coins, no — a regular computer can't mine competitively. You need either an ASIC (purpose-built SHA-256 hardware) or a small dedicated device like a NerdMiner/Bitaxe. The 'computer' just configures the miner; it doesn't do the hashing. You don't need a gaming PC or anything powerful to point a miner at BCMonster.

Legitimate proof-of-work mining is a real, decades-old process that secures blockchains — you contribute computing power and earn rewards. That said, the space has scams around it: cloud-mining contracts that never pay, fake 'mining' apps, and hardware fraud. BCMonster is a real mining pool where you connect your own hardware; be wary of anything promising guaranteed returns or asking you to recruit others.

No — treat any 'get rich quick' mining pitch as a red flag. Realistic mining is either small steady pool income or high-variance solo lottery where a win is rare. Profitability depends heavily on hardware, electricity cost, coin price, and difficulty, all of which fluctuate. Mine because you find it interesting and understand the economics, not for guaranteed riches.

No. Each coin automatically adjusts its difficulty so blocks are found at a roughly constant rate regardless of total hashrate. If more miners join, difficulty rises to keep block time steady; if miners leave, it falls. More hashrate improves your share of rewards, but it doesn't speed up the network's block schedule.

Start with three things: (1) a SHA-256 miner (a NerdMiner/Bitaxe is a cheap, beginner-friendly way in; an ASIC if you want serious hashrate), (2) a wallet address for the coin you want to mine, and (3) the correct BCMonster stratum URL and port. Point the miner at BCMonster with your address as the username and x (pool) or m=solo (solo) as the password. Then watch your dashboard.

An ESP32-based miner like a NerdMiner is the cheapest entry point — often under the cost of dinner. It has tiny hashrate (essentially a lottery ticket for finding a block), but it's a fun, low-cost way to learn and appears on the One Shot Olympics leaderboard. For real earning potential you'd want a Bitaxe or a used ASIC, which cost more.

A NerdMiner is a low-cost ESP32 device that hashes SHA-256 very slowly (kilohashes to low megahashes). Realistically your odds of finding a Bitcoin block are astronomically small — it's a lottery ticket. But it can happen, and on low-difficulty coins the odds improve. It's mainly for fun, learning, and the leaderboard, not income.

The Bitaxe is a popular open-source single-chip ASIC miner (using BM1366/BM1368/BM1370 chips). It's far more powerful than a NerdMiner but still small and quiet enough for a desk. It's a favorite for solo lottery mining and learning about ASICs. Connect it to BCMonster's standard port for your coin.

No. BCMonster runs full nodes for every supported coin, builds the block templates, and submits found blocks for you. You just connect your miner. Running your own node is optional and only needed if you want to solo-mine completely independently without any pool.

Once your miner connects and submits its first share, your dashboard populates within a short time. Very small miners submit shares infrequently, so it can take a little longer to show a stable hashrate. If nothing appears after several minutes of the miner running, re-check your stratum URL, port, and address.

Bitcoin mining is a guessing game secured by math. Your miner takes the pending block of transactions plus a changing number (the nonce), runs it through the SHA-256 hash function, and checks whether the result is below the network's target. If not, it changes the nonce and tries again — billions of times per second. The first miner on the whole network to find a valid hash gets to add the block and collect the reward. It's called proof of work because finding that hash provably took real computation, which is what makes rewriting Bitcoin's history prohibitively expensive.

A pool like BCMonster lets many miners combine their guessing power and share the reward, so you earn steadily instead of waiting years for a solo block.

There's no fixed answer because you don't mine "1 BTC" — you mine blocks, and each block currently pays a fixed subsidy (3.125 BTC after the 2024 halving) plus fees. The network produces one block roughly every 10 minutes regardless of how much hashrate exists; difficulty adjusts to keep that pace.

For an individual miner, your share of a block equals your share of the network's total hashrate. A home ASIC is a rounding error against the global network, so solo-mining a full BTC block is lottery odds. That's exactly why BCMonster supports pool mining (steady fractional payouts) and lower-difficulty SHA-256 coins like DGB, PPC, BCH2, and BC2 where small hardware has realistic block-find odds.

A GPU is a flexible processor that can mine many different algorithms. An ASIC is silicon hardwired to do exactly one thing — for BCMonster's coins, SHA-256 hashing — and nothing else. That specialization makes ASICs tens of thousands of times more efficient per watt at SHA-256 than any GPU.

The practical takeaway: SHA-256 coins (Bitcoin and everything BCMonster supports) are ASIC-only in any serious sense. GPUs are used for other algorithms (like those in some altcoins) but can't compete on SHA-256. If you want to mine here, you want an ASIC — from a data-center Antminer down to a tiny Bitaxe or NerdMiner.

It depends almost entirely on three numbers: your electricity cost, your hardware's efficiency (joules per terahash), and the coin price. Under roughly $0.06/kWh with a modern efficient ASIC, mining can be genuinely profitable. Above $0.12/kWh with older gear, you may spend more on power than you earn.

Profit isn't only about big BTC farms, though. BCMonster's multi-coin model lets you point the same hardware at lower-difficulty coins where your odds of actually finding blocks are far better, and merge mining earns you Namecoin and Fractal Bitcoin for free alongside BTC. Run the math on your own power rate before buying — that's the number that decides it.

Both are tiny, low-power, open-source SHA-256 miners built for hobbyists and "solo lottery" mining. A Bitaxe uses a single real ASIC chip (BM1366/BM1368/BM1370) pulled from the same family as commercial miners, so it does meaningfully more hashrate — a few hundred gigahash to low terahash. A NerdMiner runs on an inexpensive ESP32 microcontroller; its hashrate is far lower, and it's more about the fun and the lottery ticket than expected earnings.

On BCMonster, connect a Bitaxe to the Standard port and a NerdMiner/ESP32 device to the ESP32 port (9999). Both are automatically solo, and every share you submit is tracked on the One Shot Olympics leaderboard even if you never find a block.

It's a trade-off between consistency and jackpot. Pool mining combines your hashrate with everyone else's and pays you a steady stream proportional to your contribution — small but predictable. Solo mining means you keep the entire block reward if your miner finds the block, but you might wait a very long time between wins (or, with small hardware, effectively never on high-difficulty coins).

BCMonster supports both on every coin with a single password switch: x for pool, m=solo for solo. A common strategy: pool-mine a coin where you want steady income, and solo-mine a lower-difficulty coin where a jackpot is actually reachable.

Hashrate is simply how many guesses per second your miner (or the whole network) can make. The units scale up by 1,000: MH/s (mega, millions), GH/s (giga, billions), TH/s (tera, trillions), PH/s (peta), EH/s (exa). A NerdMiner might do a few hundred KH/s–MH/s; a Bitaxe hundreds of GH/s to ~1 TH/s; a data-center ASIC hundreds of TH/s; the entire Bitcoin network is measured in hundreds of EH/s.

More hashrate means more guesses, which means a proportionally larger share of rewards. Your BCMonster dashboard shows your live and average hashrate per worker.

Bitcoin's block subsidy halves roughly every four years, and the last new coin is projected to be mined around the year 2140. After that, miners are no longer paid a subsidy — they're compensated entirely by transaction fees. The network keeps running exactly as before; only the reward composition changes. Well before then, fees are expected to make up a growing share of miner income at each halving.

This is far enough out that it changes nothing about mining today, but it's one of the most-searched questions — so: the lights don't go off, the incentive just shifts from new issuance to fees.

Yes — and it's the first thing to set up, because your wallet address is your payout destination and your account. On BCMonster there's no separate signup: you point your miner at the stratum server using your wallet address as the username, and earnings are sent straight to that address. Get a wallet for the coin you want to mine (a self-custody wallet where you control the keys is strongly recommended), copy its receiving address, and you're ready.

For merge mining, register your Namecoin and Fractal Bitcoin addresses in your profile so those free rewards reach you too — otherwise merge-mined blocks default to the pool.

Merge mining, or AuxPoW (Auxiliary Proof of Work), exploits the fact that SHA-256 work done for one chain can simultaneously satisfy another chain that accepts it. The result: your miner does its normal Bitcoin hashing, and that same work also mines compatible chains — with zero extra electricity or hardware.

On BCMonster, every BTC miner automatically merge-mines Namecoin (NMC) and Fractal Bitcoin (FB). You don't configure anything on your miner; just add your NMC and FB payout addresses in your wallet profile so any merge-mined blocks pay out to you. It's genuinely free bonus rewards riding on hashrate you're already spending.

The BM1373 is the newest Bitmain SHA-256 ASIC chip to reach the home-mining world. It is the successor to the BM1370 used in the Bitaxe Gamma and NerdQAxe++. Early boards built on it — the Bitaxe Naja Duo, NerdAxe Gaia, Nexus S1, Hammer Thor, Zyber Blanc, Bitfortun BS-1 and Harlo's H15 / B30 — advertise around 2–2.5 TH/s per chip at roughly 10 J/TH, compared with about 1.2 TH/s and 15–18 J/TH for a stock BM1370 board.

In plain terms: the same electricity buys you noticeably more hashrate, which is exactly what matters for a miner running in your house.

Each is a generation of Bitmain's SHA-256 mining chip. Home miners reuse the same chips found in Antminers, which is why each new Antminer generation is followed by a new wave of Bitaxe-style boards.

• BM1387 — Antminer S9 era. Old and power-hungry.
• BM1397 — Antminer S17 / T17 era; the original Bitaxe Max.
• BM1366 — Antminer S19 XP era; Bitaxe Ultra and early Lucky Miners.
• BM1368 — Antminer S21 era; Bitaxe Supra.
• BM1370 — Antminer S21 Pro era; Bitaxe Gamma, GT, Hex, NerdQAxe++, NerdOctaxe.
• BM1373 — the 2026 generation; Naja Duo, NerdAxe Gaia, Nexus S1, Harlo, Hammer, Zyber.

Every one of them mines SHA-256, so all of them work on every BCMonster coin — BTC, BCH, DGB, PPC, XEC, BC2, BCH2 and FB — with the same settings, just a different port.

If your BM1370 board works, there's no rush. A BM1373 miner mainly saves electricity per terahash; it does not change the odds per terahash. Upgrade when the price per TH/s makes sense for you, not because it's new.

Before buying any brand-new model:

• Many BM1373 miners launched as preorders. Check the seller, the delivery window, the warranty and the refund policy before paying full price.
• Compare price per TH/s and watts per TH/s (J/TH), not just the headline hashrate.
• Look for real owner screenshots of hashrate and temperatures, not only marketing images.

The Naja Duo is a two-chip BM1373 Bitaxe rated around 4.4 TH/s at about 42 W. It runs AxeOS like every other Bitaxe:

1. Type the miner's IP address into a browser to open AxeOS, then go to Settings.
2. Stratum Host: stratum.bcmonster.com — no stratum+tcp:// in front.
3. Stratum Port: 3333 for BTC pool mining or 3335 for BTC solo (other coins have their own ports — the Quick Connect button shows them).
4. Stratum User: your wallet address, optionally followed by .workername.
5. Password: x. Save and restart.

The whole Nerd family (NerdAxe, NerdAxe Gaia, NerdQAxe+, NerdQAxe++, NerdQX, NerdOctaxe, NerdEKO) runs a fork of AxeOS, so setup matches a Bitaxe: open the IP in a browser, go to Settings, and enter the host and port in separate boxes:

• Host stratum.bcmonster.com, port 3333 (BTC pool) or 3335 (BTC solo)
• User: your wallet address (.workername optional), password x

All of these, including multi-TH boards like the NerdOctaxe (~9.6–12 TH/s), belong on our Standard ports — they're made for up to 99 TH/s. The ESP32 ports are only for NerdMiner-style ESP32 boards.

The Nexus S1 is a BM1373 home miner advertised at about 10 TH/s near 100 W; the single-chip S1-1 is smaller. Open the miner's web page (its IP address) or its app, find the Pool settings and enter:

• URL stratum+tcp://stratum.bcmonster.com:3333 — or, if the screen has separate boxes, host stratum.bcmonster.com and port 3333
• Worker: your wallet address.nexus1, password x

Use 3335 instead of 3333 to solo mine BTC. A 10 TH/s miner is a great match for our smaller SHA-256 coins — see the solo odds table further down.

Harlo's BM1373 miners use Harlo OS. The B30 is SHA-256 only (around 30 TH/s). The H15 Dual is a two-algorithm machine: about 15 TH/s of SHA-256 plus a separate Scrypt section for Dogecoin / Litecoin.

• Put the BCMonster details in the SHA-256 / Bitcoin pool slot: stratum+tcp://stratum.bcmonster.com:3333, your wallet address as the user, password x.
• BCMonster is SHA-256 (plus Verus), so the Scrypt half needs a Scrypt pool — don't enter our address there. Both halves can run at the same time.

The B30 at ~30 TH/s still belongs on the Standard ports; you only need Pro ports at 100 TH/s and up.

These newer home miners (Hammer Thor X1 / P2 / Glod P3, Zyber Blanc / 8S / 8G, Bitfortun BS-1) each have their own web page or phone app, but they all ask for the same three things:

1. Pool address — either one full URL stratum+tcp://stratum.bcmonster.com:3333, or host stratum.bcmonster.com and port 3333 in separate boxes.
2. Worker / user — your wallet address, optionally .workername.
3. Password — x (or use port 3335 to solo mine BTC).

Quick Connect lists every one of these models, so you can search the name and copy the exact values.

It depends on your budget and how much noise and heat you can live with. A rough guide by size:

• Desk toy / learning (~0.5–1.5 TH/s): Bitaxe Gamma 601, NerdAxe, Lucky Miner LV06/LV07. Quiet, about 15–25 W, great for learning and lottery solo mining.
• Serious hobby (2–6 TH/s): Bitaxe GT / Turbo / Hex, Naja Duo, NerdQAxe++, NerdQX, Nexus S1-1. Still home-friendly.
• Home power user (9–15 TH/s): NerdOctaxe, Nexus S1, Hammer Thor P2 / Glod P3, Harlo H15 Dual. More fan noise and heat — a spare room or garage works well.
• Bigger (30 TH/s and up): Harlo B30, Avalon Nano/Mini/Q, or a full Antminer — these are loud and need proper power and airflow.

Whatever you choose, look at J/TH (efficiency) and price per TH/s, and buy from a seller with a real warranty.

Average time to one solo block, worked out from each network's hashrate in October 2026 (these move every day — your worker page always shows the live estimate):

These are averages. Solo mining is a lottery: you can hit sooner, or go much longer. Smaller coins hit far more often but each block is worth less, so pool mining is the steady option and solo is the jackpot option.

Every Bitaxe, Nerd*, Nexus, Hammer, Zyber, Harlo and Avalon Nano / Mini belongs on the Standard ports (made for up to 99 TH/s). For Bitcoin that's 3333 for pool and 3335 for solo.

• Pro (100–499 TH/s) and Elite (500 TH/s+) start at a much higher difficulty. A small miner on those ports sends very few shares, so its hashrate graph looks jumpy and wrong.
• ESP32 ports are only for NerdMiner / NMMiner-style ESP32 boards running at kilohashes.

J/TH (joules per terahash) is the power a miner burns per unit of work. Lower is better. It's the same number as “watts per TH/s”: a 10 TH/s miner drawing 100 W is 10 J/TH.

It matters because electricity is the main ongoing cost of mining. Two miners with the same hashrate can have very different power bills. Roughly: old S9s are ~100 J/TH, BM1370 home boards ~15–18 J/TH, and the newest BM1373 boards and big industrial machines are around 10 J/TH and below.

To estimate your monthly power cost: watts × 24 × 30 ÷ 1000 × your price per kWh.

Yes, and it's one of the smartest ways to home-mine. Practically every watt a miner uses turns into heat, so in a cold month the electricity is doing two jobs at once: heating the room and mining coins. Several home miners are sold specifically as “heater miners”.

Use proper circuits (big miners need a dedicated outlet), keep vents clear, and never cover or enclose a miner without airflow.

Single-chip boards (Bitaxe Gamma / Supra / Ultra, NerdAxe, Lucky Miner LV06/LV07) are near-silent on a desk. Multi-chip boards (Hex, NerdQAxe++, NerdOctaxe) and 10 TH/s units like the Nexus S1 have bigger fans — fine in an office, noticeable at night. Full-size Antminers and Whatsminers are 70–80 dB and are not bedroom machines.

Tip: many AxeOS boards let you set a fan target temperature. A slightly higher target means a quieter fan, at the cost of running warmer.

Lucky Miners run an AxeOS-style web page. Open the miner's IP address in a browser, go to the pool settings, and enter host stratum.bcmonster.com, port 3333 (or 3335 for BTC solo), your wallet address as the user, and x as the password. Save and restart.

Open the Avalon app (or the miner's IP address in a browser), go to Pool settings, and set Pool 1 to stratum+tcp://stratum.bcmonster.com:3333 with your wallet address as the worker and x as the password. The Nano and Mini (4–37.5 TH/s) and the Avalon Q (~90 TH/s) all use the Standard ports.

A few common reasons:

• Heat throttling. If the chip gets hot, AxeOS lowers performance. Improve airflow or add a better heatsink and fan.
• Weak power supply. An underpowered or cheap PSU causes voltage drops and lower hashrate. Use the PSU the board was designed for.
• Averaging. Pool hashrate is calculated from shares and swings a lot over short periods. Judge it over hours, not minutes.
• Advertised = best case. Many listings quote overclocked numbers. Stock settings are usually a bit lower.

In AxeOS Settings you can raise the frequency and core voltage. Go up in small steps, wait 15–30 minutes after each change, and watch two things: chip temperature and the error rate. Stop when temperatures stay high or errors climb.

• More frequency needs more voltage, and more voltage means a lot more heat. Efficiency (J/TH) usually gets worse as you push.
• Better cooling (bigger heatsink, better fan) is what makes a stable overclock possible.
• If the board starts rebooting, go back to the last stable step.

Most owners aim to keep the ASIC chip around 60–65 °C. Many boards start throttling or protecting themselves in the 70s °C. If you're running hot: check the fan is spinning and set to auto or a high percentage, make sure the heatsink is seated with paste, give it space to breathe, and undo any recent overclock.

Restarts are almost always caused by power or overclocking. Try the stock frequency and voltage first. Then check the power supply: it needs enough amps for your board (multi-chip boards need much more than a Gamma), and barrel plugs and cables must be snug. Weak Wi-Fi can also cause reconnect loops — move the miner closer to the router.

A small number of rejects is normal — most are stale shares submitted just after a new block arrived. A steady high reject rate usually means an unstable overclock (the chip is making errors), a slow or dropping connection, or a wrong setting such as a worker on the wrong coin's port. Go back to stock clocks first, then check your connection.

1. Host without the prefix: AxeOS wants stratum.bcmonster.com, not stratum+tcp://stratum.bcmonster.com:3333.
2. Port in its own box: e.g. 3333.
3. User is a valid address for that coin: a BTC address on BTC ports, a BCH address on BCH ports, and so on.
4. No spaces before or after any value — a common copy-paste problem.
5. Save, then press Restart; settings don't apply until it reboots.

AxeOS has an Update page. Download the firmware and web-interface files for your exact board from the official Bitaxe (or Nerd*) release page and upload them there. Your pool settings normally survive an update, but note them down first just in case. Never flash firmware meant for a different board.

AxeOS counts every hash the chip checks, including ones from before you joined BCMonster or from other pools, and it may reset on reboot. BCMonster only records shares your miner actually sent to us. Both are correct — they're measuring different things. Your all-time best on our pool is on your worker page and the Leaderboards.

Check that you are looking up the exact same address you typed into the miner, on the coin that matches the port you used. Port 3333 is Bitcoin, so the stats appear under BTC. Small miners can take a few minutes to send their first share. If AxeOS shows accepted shares climbing, the pool is receiving them — give the dashboard a few minutes to catch up.

Most ESP32-based miners (Bitaxe, NerdAxe, NerdMiner and most small home miners) only support 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi. If your router combines 2.4 and 5 GHz under one name, try a separate 2.4 GHz network. Avoid special characters in the Wi-Fi password, and keep the miner within good range. A Wi-Fi miner uses very little data, so speed doesn't matter — signal strength does.

Bitcoin's supply is capped at 21 million. As of October 2026 (block ~972,000) roughly 20.1 million have been mined, leaving about 900,000 BTC still to be created. Because the reward halves every four years, those remaining coins trickle out more and more slowly — the very last fraction of a bitcoin is expected around the year 2140.

The next halving happens at block 1,050,000, expected around April 2028. The block reward drops from 3.125 BTC to 1.5625 BTC. Halvings happen every 210,000 blocks (about four years); the exact date depends on how fast blocks are found.

Since the April 2024 halving, each Bitcoin block pays 3.125 BTC in new coins, plus all the transaction fees in that block. The fees vary block to block. On BCMonster, the full reward — subsidy plus fees — goes to miners (minus the 1.5% fee), whether you're pool or solo.

Not in any meaningful way. Bitcoin uses SHA-256, and a phone is millions of times slower than even a small ASIC. Most “Bitcoin mining” phone apps are really ad apps, cloud-mining schemes, or games that pay out tiny rewards.

A phone can do real mining on CPU-friendly coins. Verus (VRSC) uses VerusHash, which was designed for ordinary CPUs, and BCMonster runs a Verus pool at bcmonster.com/vrsc. Verus miners also merge-mine CHIPS, vARRR and vDEX for free. Expect small rewards, and keep a phone cool and on its charger.

To manage a real miner from your phone, a monitoring app such as our partner RigViewer is the practical route.

There's no free lunch: real mining needs hardware and electricity. Sites and apps promising free Bitcoin mining with no hardware are almost always ads-for-pennies schemes, or lead-ins to a paid “upgrade” that never pays back. A genuine pool like BCMonster never asks you to deposit money — you point your own miner at it and get paid to your own wallet.

The closest thing to free on BCMonster is merge mining: your BTC hashrate also mines Namecoin and Fractal Bitcoin at no extra cost.

Not all of it, but a lot of it is. Warning signs: guaranteed daily returns, referral bonuses that pay more than mining does, no proof of real hardware, and withdrawal limits. Even honest contracts are often priced so the seller profits more than you.

If you want hashrate without owning hardware, open marketplaces like NiceHash, Mining Rig Rentals or Braiins Hashpower let you rent real machines and point them at a pool you choose — including BCMonster's Pro ports. You can verify the hashrate arriving on our dashboard yourself.

It depends almost entirely on your electricity price and your miner's efficiency (J/TH). The math:

1. Your share of the network = your hashrate ÷ network hashrate.
2. BTC per day ≈ that share × 144 blocks × 3.125 BTC (plus fees).
3. Cost per day = watts × 24 ÷ 1000 × price per kWh.
4. Cost per BTC = cost per day ÷ BTC per day.

Large miners with cheap power and ~15 J/TH machines can produce a bitcoin well below the market price; a home miner on residential electricity usually can't. That's why many home miners treat it as heat, hobby or lottery — or mine smaller SHA-256 coins where their share is bigger.

Yes — solar is one of the best fits for home mining, because surplus daytime power that would otherwise be exported for very little can earn coins instead. Small boards like a Bitaxe (~15–40 W) or a 10 TH/s BM1373 miner (~100 W) are easy to run from a modest solar setup. Miners also don't mind being switched on and off with the sun; they reconnect to the pool automatically.

Yes. Every so often a small solo miner — sometimes a single Bitaxe-class device — wins a full Bitcoin block, and it makes headlines precisely because it's so unlikely. Statistically each lucky win is rare, but the odds are never zero: each hash is an equal ticket, no matter how small the miner.

If you want much better odds with the same hardware, solo mine a smaller SHA-256 coin (see the solo odds table in the BM1373 section above).

No. Dogecoin and Litecoin use the Scrypt algorithm and need Scrypt miners (like Antminer L-series or the Scrypt half of a Harlo H15 Dual). BCMonster mines SHA-256 coins (BTC, BCH, DGB, PPC, XEC, BC2, BCH2, plus FB and NMC via merge mining) and Verus (VerusHash, CPU-friendly). A SHA-256 miner can't mine Scrypt coins, and the reverse is also true.

Verus (VRSC) is a popular choice. Its VerusHash algorithm was built so ordinary CPUs stay competitive, and it runs on desktops, laptops, Raspberry Pis and even phones. On BCMonster's Verus pool your VRSC hashrate also merge-mines CHIPS, vARRR and vDEX at no extra cost, paid to the same address. Start at bcmonster.com/vrsc — Quick Connect there has hellminer and ccminer commands ready to copy.

Every 2,016 blocks (about two weeks), Bitcoin resets its difficulty so that blocks keep arriving about every 10 minutes. If miners joined and blocks came faster, difficulty goes up; if hashrate left, it goes down. Some coins adjust much more often — Bitcoin Cash and eCash adjust every block, and DigiByte splits its blocks across five algorithms.

In October 2026, Bitcoin's network hashrate is about 1.2 zettahashes per second (≈1,200 EH/s) — that's 1,200,000,000 TH/s. A 1.2 TH/s Bitaxe is about one billionth of the network. The live figure is on BCMonster's Bitcoin dashboard.

SHA-256 is Bitcoin's mining algorithm, and any SHA-256 ASIC (Antminer S-series, Whatsminer, Avalon, Bitaxe, etc.) can mine every SHA-256 coin. On BCMonster that's Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), DigiByte (DGB, SHA-256 algo), Peercoin (PPC), eCash (XEC), Bitcoin II (BC2), Bitcoin Cash II (BCH2), plus Fractal Bitcoin (FB) and Namecoin (NMC), which you can also get through merge mining. Switching coins is just a port change.

Most pools charge between about 1% and 4%, and PPS-style pools that absorb variance for you usually sit at the higher end. BCMonster charges a flat 1.5% on every coin, pool or solo, with no hidden withdrawal fees and no account needed.

In most countries, including the US, Canada and the UK, running a home miner is legal and needs no special license — it's like running any other computer. Some countries restrict or ban mining, and rental agreements or local electricity rules can matter. Mining income is usually taxable. Check your local rules; this isn't legal advice.

Two ways. Turn on Alerts on BCMonster (the bell button in the header) for browser notifications. Or use our partner RigViewer (iPhone and Android): it shows live hashrate and temperatures and sends instant alerts when a rig drops or overheats.

AxeOS is the open-source firmware and web dashboard that runs on Bitaxe miners (and, in forked form, on NerdAxe / NerdQAxe and many clones). It's where you enter pool settings, watch hashrate and temperatures, and tune frequency and voltage.

A hash is a fixed-length fingerprint of data. Change one character of the input and the hash changes completely and unpredictably. Mining is the search for a block hash that is lower than a target number; the only way to find one is to try enormous numbers of inputs.

They're units of hashrate, each 1,000 times the last: KH/s (thousand hashes per second — ESP32 NerdMiners), MH/s, GH/s, TH/s (trillion — Bitaxe and Antminers), PH/s (quadrillion — farms and pools), EH/s (quintillion — whole networks), and ZH/s, where Bitcoin's network now sits.

The nonce (“number used once”) is the field in a block header that miners change on each attempt. It only has about 4 billion values, which a modern ASIC exhausts in a fraction of a second, so miners also vary the extranonce and timestamp, and AsicBoost-capable miners roll version bits.

The coinbase transaction is the first transaction in every block, the one that creates new coins and collects the fees for the miner. The exchange Coinbase is named after it, but they're unrelated.

The mempool (memory pool) is the waiting room for transactions that have been broadcast but not yet put into a block. Miners usually pick the ones paying the highest fee per byte. When the mempool is crowded, fees — and miners' income from fees — go up.

A confirmation is each new block added on top of the block containing a transaction. Newly mined coins can't be spent until 100 blocks have been built on top (on Bitcoin and most forks), in case the block gets orphaned. That's why a found block shows as pending or maturing before payouts are sent.

PPLNS means “Pay Per Last N Shares”. When the pool finds a block, the reward is split among the miners who contributed the most recent shares, in proportion to their work. It rewards steady miners and discourages pool-hopping. BCMonster's pool mode uses PPLNS; solo mode pays the whole block to the finder.

AuxPoW (Auxiliary Proof of Work) is the mechanism behind merge mining. A child chain such as Namecoin or Fractal Bitcoin accepts proof that work was done on the parent chain (Bitcoin), so the same hashes can secure both and earn on both.

A full-size ASIC has three main parts: hashboards (circuit boards covered in mining chips — usually three), a control board (a small computer running the firmware and web page), and a PSU (power supply). If one hashboard fails, the miner keeps running at reduced hashrate. Home miners like the Bitaxe combine all of this on one small board.

They describe cooling. Air miners use fans. Hydro miners (like the S21 Hydro or NerdOctaxe Hydro) use liquid cooling loops, which allow higher hashrate and much less noise. Immersion miners sit submerged in a non-conductive fluid. Liquid-cooled machines can also make their waste heat easy to reuse — for water or home heating.

Third-party firmware for Antminers and similar machines that adds autotuning, under/overclocking, power limits and better efficiency. All of them work with BCMonster — enter our stratum URL in their Pools page. Some charge a small dev fee by redirecting a little hashrate; check the details of the one you choose.

Bitcoin stood on decades of earlier attempts at digital money:

• 1983 — David Chaum's blind signatures, which became DigiCash (ecash) in the 1990s: private digital cash, but run by one company. It went bankrupt in 1998.
• Late 1980s–90s — the Cypherpunks, a mailing list of cryptographers and privacy activists who believed strong cryptography could protect individual freedom. Many later Bitcoin pioneers came from it.
• 1997 — Adam Back's Hashcash, a proof-of-work system meant to fight email spam. Bitcoin mining is a direct descendant of it, and the Bitcoin whitepaper cites it.
• 1998 — Wei Dai's b-money and Nick Szabo's bit gold (proposed 1998, written up 2005): designs for decentralised digital money that were never fully launched.
• 2004 — Hal Finney's RPOW (reusable proofs of work).

Bitcoin's breakthrough was combining proof of work, a public chain of blocks and economic incentives so that no central party was needed at all.

On October 31, 2008, someone using the name Satoshi Nakamoto posted “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” to a cryptography mailing list. The nine-page paper described how to stop double-spending without a bank by having miners compete with proof of work to extend a shared chain of blocks. It's one of the most influential technical papers of the century.

Bitcoin's first block, block 0, was mined by Satoshi on January 3, 2009. Its coinbase contains a newspaper headline: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” It proves the block wasn't made earlier, and it's widely read as a comment on the 2008 financial crisis Bitcoin was born into.

The 50 BTC reward in the Genesis Block can never be spent — a quirk of how it was coded.

Hal Finney, a respected cryptographer and Cypherpunk, received 10 BTC from Satoshi in block 170 on January 12, 2009. Finney had tweeted “Running bitcoin” on January 11 — one of the first people other than Satoshi to run the software and mine.

On May 22, 2010, programmer Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 BTC for two Papa John's pizzas — the first well-known purchase of real goods with Bitcoin. The coins were worth about $41 then. May 22 is now celebrated as Bitcoin Pizza Day.

Laszlo is also a mining pioneer: he's credited with being among the first to mine Bitcoin on a GPU, in 2010.

Yes. On August 15, 2010, someone exploited an overflow bug and created a transaction in block 74,638 producing over 184 billion BTC. It was spotted within hours; Satoshi and developers released a fix, and miners built a new valid chain without that transaction, which soon overtook the bad one. It remains the most serious bug in Bitcoin's history — and a showcase of the network repairing itself.

Nobody knows for certain. Satoshi communicated only by email and forum posts, handed the project to other developers, and stopped communicating publicly around 2011. Many people have been suggested or claimed to be Satoshi; none has been proven.

Researchers estimate Satoshi mined roughly 1 million BTC in Bitcoin's first year, and those coins have essentially never moved. Satoshi's silence is often seen as a gift: Bitcoin has no founder to arrest, bribe or follow.

Mt. Gox, a Tokyo exchange, handled most of the world's Bitcoin trading by 2013. In February 2014 it halted withdrawals and filed for bankruptcy, saying about 850,000 BTC was missing after years of undetected theft (around 200,000 were later found). Creditors waited about a decade for partial repayment. Its lesson became the crypto motto: “Not your keys, not your coins.” It's also why BCMonster pays directly to your wallet.

From about 2015 to 2017, the Bitcoin community argued over how to scale. One side wanted bigger blocks for more transactions on-chain; the other wanted to keep blocks small so anyone could run a node, and scale with upgrades like SegWit and the Lightning Network.

On August 1, 2017, big-block supporters forked off as Bitcoin Cash (BCH) with 8 MB blocks. SegWit activated on Bitcoin a few weeks later, on August 24, 2017. BCH itself split again in November 2018, creating Bitcoin SV, and in 2020, creating eCash (XEC) — both BCH and XEC are mineable on BCMonster today.

Taproot activated on Bitcoin in November 2021 at block 709,632. It added Schnorr signatures and made complex spending conditions cheaper and more private. Interestingly, miners signalled readiness first, using a method called “Speedy Trial”. Taproot addresses start with bc1p, and BCMonster accepts them for payouts.

Ordinals (launched January 2023) let people “inscribe” images and text onto individual satoshis, creating NFT-like items on Bitcoin. Runes (launched at the April 2024 halving block) added fungible tokens. Both brought waves of demand for block space, sending transaction fees — and miner revenue — sharply higher at times, including a record fee spike on halving day 2024.

The U.S. SEC approved the first spot Bitcoin ETFs on January 10, 2024, and they began trading the next day. Funds from giants like BlackRock and Fidelity quickly gathered tens of billions of dollars, making Bitcoin available in ordinary brokerage and retirement accounts.

El Salvador, in September 2021. The government launched a national wallet and later mined Bitcoin with geothermal energy from a volcano. In 2025 the law was changed so businesses no longer had to accept Bitcoin, but the country kept buying and holding it.

China hosted the majority of Bitcoin's hashrate until mid-2021, when the government ordered mining shut down. Network hashrate fell roughly in half within weeks — and the network kept running. Blocks slowed until the next difficulty adjustment, which then made the largest downward cut in Bitcoin's history. Miners moved to the United States (especially Texas), Kazakhstan, Russia and elsewhere, and hashrate recovered to new highs within months. It was the ultimate test of decentralisation.

2022 was crypto's worst year of collapses. In May, the TerraUSD algorithmic stablecoin lost its peg and its sister token LUNA collapsed, erasing tens of billions. Lenders such as Celsius and Voyager froze withdrawals that summer. In November, the exchange FTX collapsed after it emerged that customer funds had been misused; founder Sam Bankman-Fried was later convicted of fraud.

Through all of it, the Bitcoin network itself kept producing blocks. Every one of those failures was a centralised company holding other people's coins — once again, the case for self-custody.

Each halving cuts new supply in half. Historically the following year or so has included major price moves, but past cycles don't guarantee future ones.

• 2009: No market price. One early quote valued $1 at about 1,300 BTC, based on the cost of electricity.
• February 2011: Reached $1 (parity with the US dollar).
• November 2013: First passed $1,000.
• December 2017: Nearly $20,000 at the peak of the ICO boom.
• November 2021: About $69,000.
• December 2024: Crossed $100,000 for the first time.

Every one of those peaks was followed by deep drops of 50–80%. Volatility is part of Bitcoin's history; never mine or invest more than you can afford to see fall.

The Lightning Network is a “layer 2” payment network built on top of Bitcoin. Users open payment channels secured by on-chain transactions, then send near-instant, very cheap payments that settle on Bitcoin later. It was proposed in a 2015 paper by Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja and went live on mainnet in 2018. Miners still secure it: every channel opens and closes on the main chain.

Silk Road was an online black market that ran from 2011 until the FBI shut it down in October 2013, and it accepted Bitcoin for payment. It gave Bitcoin an early reputation for crime. It also showed how traceable Bitcoin is: investigators followed the public blockchain, and seized coins are still being tracked and auctioned years later. Bitcoin is pseudonymous, not anonymous.

1. CPU era (2009–2010): Anyone could mine on a laptop with the original Bitcoin software. Satoshi and Hal Finney mined this way.
2. GPU era (2010–2012): Graphics cards turned out to be many times faster at SHA-256. Open-source GPU miners spread fast, and home “rigs” of several graphics cards appeared.
3. FPGA era (2011–2013): Programmable chips gave better efficiency than GPUs, but only briefly.
4. ASIC era (2013–today): Chips built only to compute SHA-256. The first shipped in early 2013, and each generation since has been dramatically more efficient. GPUs and CPUs were left behind for Bitcoin for good.

Today's era adds a twist: open-source home ASICs like the Bitaxe have put real mining back on people's desks.

The first ASIC miners delivered to customers were the Avalon units in January 2013, from the team that became Canaan — still making Avalon miners today. Butterfly Labs took heavy preorders but shipped very late. Bitmain released its first Antminer S1 in late 2013 and, with the S9 in 2016, became the dominant manufacturer. MicroBT's Whatsminers became its main rival.

Slush Pool (today Braiins Pool), run by Marek “Slush” Palatinus in Prague, launched in late 2010 and found its first block that December. As difficulty climbed, solo mining became a lottery for most people, and pools let miners combine their power to earn steady payouts. The same idea powers BCMonster today.

Early pools used getwork, in which miners repeatedly asked the pool for new work over HTTP. It couldn't keep up with fast hardware. In 2012, the Slush Pool team introduced Stratum: one long-lived connection on which the pool pushes jobs and miners can roll their own work. It became the standard, which is why miner settings still say stratum+tcp://. Its successor, Stratum V2, adds encryption and lets miners choose their own block transactions.

Briefly, it came close. In mid-2014, the pool GHash.io touched around half of the network's hashrate. Miners voluntarily left it to protect the network, and it pledged never to exceed 40%. The episode is why miners are encouraged to spread across many pools — including smaller, independent ones like BCMonster.

AsicBoost, published in 2016, is a technique that saves about 20% of the work per hash attempt. In 2017 it became controversial when a hidden (“covert”) form was alleged to conflict with SegWit. The open (“overt”) form, which rolls version bits, was standardised as BIP 310 and is now used by almost every modern miner. BCMonster supports it on every port, so your miner gets the full efficiency benefit.

Namecoin, launched in April 2011 as the first fork of Bitcoin's code, added merge mining (AuxPoW) in October 2011. Bitcoin miners could then secure Namecoin with the same work at no extra cost. The idea spread to coins like Dogecoin (with Litecoin, 2014) and, much later, Fractal Bitcoin (2024). On BCMonster, every BTC miner merge-mines both NMC and FB.

The Bitaxe started as an open-source hardware project by engineer Skot in the early 2020s: a small, efficient board built around a single salvaged-style Bitmain chip, with fully public designs and firmware (AxeOS). The first popular model was the Bitaxe Max (BM1397), followed by the Ultra (BM1366), Supra (BM1368) and Gamma (BM1370). Because the designs are open, a whole ecosystem of builders — NerdAxe, NerdQAxe, Lucky Miner and many more — grew around it, and BM1373 boards are its newest chapter.

NerdMiner is an open-source project from 2023 that turns a cheap ESP32 board with a small screen into a Bitcoin “lottery miner”. It does only tens to hundreds of kilohashes per second — far too little to earn anything — but it's a fun, nearly free way to learn how mining works, and it shows your best share live. BCMonster has dedicated ESP32 ports for them.

For years, mining was assumed to belong only to industrial warehouses. Several things changed that:

• Efficient small chips (BM1370, now BM1373) made quiet desktop miners practical.
• Open-source hardware like the Bitaxe lowered prices and built a community.
• Lottery solo mining — plus occasional real block wins by tiny miners — made it exciting.
• Heat reuse: in cold months a miner doubles as a heater.
• Decentralisation: many people want hashrate spread across homes and small pools, not concentrated in a few giants.

Verus launched in May 2018 as a fair launch: no premine, no ICO and no developer allocation. Its VerusHash algorithm was designed so ordinary CPUs stay competitive, keeping mining open to everyone. Verus uses a hybrid of proof of work and proof of stake.

Its big innovation is PBaaS (Public Blockchains as a Service), which went live on mainnet in 2023 and lets anyone launch independent blockchains that connect to Verus. Merged mining across PBaaS chains is built in, which is why mining VRSC on BCMonster also mines CHIPS, vARRR and vDEX at the same time. Verus also has a built-in protocol-level DeFi system and self-sovereign VerusIDs.

They are blockchains running on Verus's PBaaS network. Each has its own coin, block rewards and community, but they can be merge-mined with VerusHash. On BCMonster's Verus pool your VRSC hashrate mines all three at no extra cost, and rewards go to the same VRSC address you mine with — nothing extra to register. Your Verus worker page shows your CHIPS, vARRR and vDEX blocks and payouts separately.

Litecoin was created by former Google engineer Charlie Lee and launched in October 2011 as “the silver to Bitcoin's gold”. It uses Scrypt instead of SHA-256, has 2.5-minute blocks and an 84 million coin cap. Litecoin has often been a testing ground for Bitcoin upgrades: it activated SegWit before Bitcoin in 2017, and added the MimbleWimble privacy extension (MWEB) in 2022.

Dogecoin was created in December 2013 by Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer as a joke based on the Shiba Inu “Doge” meme. Its friendly community — which tipped, raised money for charities and sponsored a NASCAR car — made it far more than a joke. Dogecoin uses Scrypt and has been merge-mined with Litecoin since 2014, and it has no supply cap. Celebrity attention, especially from Elon Musk, drove huge rallies in 2021.

Ethereum was proposed by Vitalik Buterin in late 2013 and launched on July 30, 2015, adding smart contracts — programs that run on the blockchain — which led to DeFi, NFTs and thousands of tokens. For seven years it was mined with GPUs.

On September 15, 2022, “The Merge” switched Ethereum to proof of stake, ending ETH mining overnight. Millions of GPUs moved to other coins or were sold. Bitcoin and the SHA-256 coins on BCMonster remain proof of work.

In 2016 “The DAO”, an investment fund run by a smart contract, was drained of about a third of its ether through a code flaw. Ethereum hard-forked in July 2016 to reverse the theft. People who believed the blockchain should never be rewritten kept the original chain running as Ethereum Classic (ETC), which is still proof of work and GPU/ASIC-mined today.

Monero (XMR) launched in April 2014 as a privacy-focused coin based on CryptoNote technology. Transactions hide the sender, receiver and amount by default. Since 2019 it uses the RandomX algorithm, designed so ordinary CPUs mine efficiently and ASICs don't help. It's a popular CPU coin, along with Verus.

Kaspa fair-launched in November 2021 with no premine. Built on GHOSTDAG research, it's a “blockDAG”, which allows many blocks per second instead of one chain of slow blocks. It uses the kHeavyHash algorithm, was first mined on GPUs and is now mostly ASIC-mined. It became one of the most popular proof-of-work coins after Ethereum stopped mining.

In November 2018, Bitcoin Cash split again over upgrade disagreements. One side became Bitcoin SV (“Satoshi Vision”), backed by Craig Wright and Calvin Ayre. Both sides pointed hashrate at their chain in a so-called “hash war”, and the networks permanently separated. In 2024 a UK court ruled that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto.

Stablecoins are tokens designed to hold a steady value, usually $1. Tether (USDT) launched in 2014 and USD Coin (USDC) in 2018, both backed by reserves held by a company. Algorithmic stablecoins without real reserves, like TerraUSD, have failed badly. Stablecoins are not mined — they are issued by their operators.

Any wallet where you hold the keys works. Popular choices:

• Bitcoin (BTC): Sparrow, Electrum, BlueWallet, or a hardware wallet (Trezor, Ledger, Coldcard, BitBox).
• Bitcoin Cash (BCH): Electron Cash, Paytaca, or BCH-supporting hardware wallets.
• eCash (XEC): Cashtab (web and extension) or Electrum ABC.
• DigiByte (DGB): DigiByte Core or DigiByte mobile wallets.
• Peercoin (PPC): the official Peercoin wallet (desktop and mobile).
• Fractal Bitcoin (FB): UniSat or another Fractal-aware wallet.
• Namecoin (NMC): Namecoin Core or Electrum-NMC.
• Bitcoin II (BC2) / Bitcoin Cash II (BCH2): each project's own core wallet.
• Verus (VRSC) + CHIPS / vARRR / vDEX: Verus Desktop or Verus Mobile. One VRSC address receives all four.

Always download wallets from the project's official site or app store listing — fake wallet apps are a common scam.

A seed phrase (recovery phrase) is a list of 12 or 24 words that can rebuild every key in your wallet. Whoever has those words has your coins.

• Write it on paper or stamp it in metal. Store it somewhere safe from fire and water.
• Never type it into a website, photograph it, store it in the cloud, or send it to anyone.
• No pool, exchange or support person will ever need it. Anyone asking for it is trying to rob you.

BCMonster only ever needs your public address — never your seed phrase or private keys.

• 1… — Legacy (P2PKH). The original format. Works everywhere, slightly higher fees to spend.
• 3… — P2SH, often “wrapped SegWit” or multisig.
• bc1q… — Native SegWit (bech32). Lower fees; the most common modern format.
• bc1p… — Taproot (bech32m). The newest format, added in 2021.

All four can receive BCMonster payouts. All belong to the same Bitcoin network, and any wallet can send to any of them.

Bitcoin Cash introduced CashAddr in 2018 so BCH addresses look different from Bitcoin ones and people stop sending coins to the wrong chain. A CashAddr looks like bitcoincash:qp… — the prefix is optional, so qp… alone is the same address. eCash uses the same idea with ecash:q…. You can mine BCH or XEC on BCMonster with or without the prefix.

Not to start. Once your mining rewards add up to an amount you'd hate to lose, a hardware wallet is the best upgrade you can make: your private keys live on a small device and never touch your internet-connected computer. You can point your miner's payouts straight at a hardware-wallet address — receiving needs no device plugged in.

It's completely safe — nobody can steal coins just by knowing your address. The trade-off is privacy: anyone can see the total sent to a reused address on a block explorer. For mining that's usually fine, since your mining address is already public in the pool stats. If privacy matters, send mined coins on to fresh addresses in your own wallet.

Usually not — but don't do it on purpose. Bitcoin and its forks share key formats, so if you control the private key (or seed phrase) for that address, you can import it into a wallet for the other coin and spend from there. Each coin's port only accepts addresses that its own node says are valid, which catches most mix-ups at login. Never import a seed phrase into an unknown or unofficial wallet to “recover” coins.

Yes. Your BCMonster worker page already shows payouts to your address, and most wallets support watch-only mode, where you add an address or extended public key (xpub) and see the balance with no ability to spend. It's a great way to check payouts on your phone while the keys stay on a hardware wallet.

Use amps = watts ÷ volts, then keep a continuous load to 80% of the breaker rating (the usual electrical-code rule for loads that run for hours).

• A 15 A / 120 V circuit → about 1,440 W continuous.
• A 20 A / 120 V circuit → about 1,920 W.
• A 20 A / 240 V circuit → about 3,840 W.
• A 30 A / 240 V circuit → about 5,760 W.

Remember everything else already on that circuit. A Bitaxe (~15–40 W) is nothing; a full-size Antminer (3,000–3,600 W) needs its own 240 V circuit.

Most full-size Antminers and Whatsminers are designed for 200–240 V. At their full 3–3.6 kW draw, a 120 V circuit would need around 30 A, far beyond a normal outlet. Some smaller machines and home units (Avalon Nano/Mini, Bitaxe-class boards, many BM1373 home miners) are built for standard household power. Check the PSU label before plugging anything in.

For a small board like a Bitaxe, a decent power strip is fine. For anything drawing hundreds or thousands of watts, plug straight into a properly rated outlet, or use a heavy-gauge cord rated above the load. Thin cords and cheap strips heat up under constant load — warm plugs or a burning smell mean unplug immediately.

• Underclock with custom firmware or the miner's own low-power mode — less heat means slower fans.
• Use a purpose-built sound-dampening enclosure with proper airflow, or duct the exhaust away.
• Move it — garage, basement or shed — and run a network cable to it.
• Consider a hydro (liquid-cooled) model or a home miner designed to be quiet.

Never block a miner's airflow to muffle it — overheating will cut hashrate and shorten its life.

Nearly all the power a miner uses becomes heat: a 3,000 W Antminer heats like a 3,000 W space heater. In winter, let it warm the room. In summer, duct the hot exhaust outside or the room will keep getting hotter, the miner will throttle, and your air conditioner pays the bill. Keep intake air as cool as possible — miners are happiest with intake air below about 35 °C.

Dust clogs heatsinks and raises temperatures. High humidity (especially with condensation) can corrode boards. Clean miners with compressed air every few months with the power off, put simple filters on intakes in dusty spaces, and avoid places where condensation forms, such as cold sheds that warm up quickly.

Full-size ASICs use Ethernet only. Small boards usually use Wi-Fi, which is fine with a good signal — mining uses very little bandwidth. Wherever possible, give each miner a reserved (static) IP in your router so its web page is always at the same address.

1. Power off and reseat the data (ribbon) cable and power connectors of the missing board.
2. Swap that board's data cable to a different control-board port to see if the problem moves with the cable, the port or the board.
3. Check the PSU — a weak or failing PSU can drop a board under load.

If the board still isn't detected, it likely needs repair (often a single failed chip or regulator). The miner can keep mining on its remaining boards in the meantime.

Stock firmware stops mining if it can't read every fan's speed — it's a safety feature. Check each fan spins freely, reseat the fan cables, and replace any noisy or dead fan with the same model. Some custom firmware allows running with fewer fans for special cooling setups, but only do that if the machine is actually cooled.

Usual causes: intake air too hot, the miner breathing its own exhaust, dust-clogged heatsinks, or a failing fan. Make sure hot exhaust can't loop back to the intake, clean the heatsinks, and check fans. Undo any overclock while you diagnose.

• Check the URL is exactly stratum+tcp://stratum.bcmonster.com:PORT, with no extra spaces.
• Make sure the miner has working DNS and gateway settings (DHCP is easiest).
• Test from another device on the same network — some routers or ISPs block unusual outbound ports.
• Check the BCMonster status on the home page; if the pool is fine, it's almost always a network setting.

• Ask for a video of the miner running on its web page: all hashboards detected, hashrate near spec, normal temperatures.
• Check the J/TH — at your electricity price, an old machine may cost more to run than it earns.
• Look for corrosion or heavy dust, and check fans and PSU are included and matched.
• Ask about firmware: some locked or modified firmware can't be changed later.
• Buy from sellers with reviews or escrow, and test it the day it arrives.

Most Antminers have a small reset button on the control board. With the miner powered on and fully booted, hold it for about 10 seconds, then let the miner restart; the web login returns to the default (commonly root / root on stock firmware). Re-enter your BCMonster pool settings afterwards. Custom firmware may use its own reset method — check its documentation.

Not necessarily. Check the miner's own reported hashrate over an hour, not the pool's few-minute average. If it's still low, look for a hashboard with fewer chips or a lower rate than the others, high temperatures, or a power-saving mode. Custom-firmware autotuning can also take a while to settle after a reboot.

The pool never sees your hashrate directly — it sees shares. Each share of difficulty D takes, on average, D × 2³² hashes to find. So:

hashrate ≈ (sum of share difficulties × 4,294,967,296) ÷ seconds

Because shares arrive randomly, the estimate wobbles over short windows. That's why a few-minute average jumps around while the miner's own number stays flat — the longer the window, the more accurate it gets.

Effort compares the work the pool has done this round with the work a block needs on average. 100% means exactly average. A block found at 40% effort was lucky; one at 250% was unlucky. Effort resets to 0 every time a block is found. Over many blocks it averages close to 100% — no pool can change the underlying odds.

When the pool finds a block, it looks back over the most recent window of shares. Your payout is your share of the work in that window, times the block reward, minus the fee.

Example: the block pays 3.125 BTC plus 0.05 BTC in fees = 3.175 BTC. After the 1.5% fee, 3.127 BTC is shared. If your shares were 2% of the window, you receive about 0.0625 BTC.

Because the window looks back, a miner who has been mining steadily is rewarded fully, and a miner who just arrived earns a smaller slice until they've built up shares.

Two kinds of randomness stack up: how long the pool takes to find each block, and how many shares you happened to find in each window. On a big network with a smaller pool, blocks can be days apart, so your income arrives in lumps. Over weeks and months it averages out to your share of the pool's work — that's the trade between pool and solo mining.

Hashprice is the expected mining revenue per unit of hashrate per day, usually quoted as dollars per TH/s (or PH/s) per day. It rises with the coin's price and transaction fees, and falls as difficulty grows and at each halving. Compare hashprice with your electricity cost per TH/s per day to see if a machine is profitable.

Your chance per block is your hashrate ÷ network hashrate. Multiply by the number of blocks per day (144 for Bitcoin; it differs per coin) to get the expected number of blocks per day. Example: a 10 TH/s miner on Bitcoin at 1,200 EH/s → 10 ÷ 1,200,000,000 × 144 ≈ 0.0000012 blocks per day, or about one every 2,300 years. Your worker page shows the live estimate for each coin.

Yes — a share whose difficulty meets the network target for the job it was mined on is a block, and the pool submits it to the coin's node immediately. One exception on BCMonster: eCash uses Real-Time Targeting, where the target starts much stricter right after each block and relaxes over the next minutes. A share can beat the published difficulty but not the real-time target at that moment; the dashboard shows those as near misses.

The hashrate on a small miner's screen usually comes from the chip's own counters, so it can look perfect while nothing useful is being produced. If the share count stays at 0 — with no rejects either — and the miner's own “best difficulty” for this session is 0, the firmware is throwing away every result before it reaches the pool.

Common causes, in order:

• Version-rolling mismatch. The firmware rebuilds each result using the version mask the pool offered. If it handles that mask differently from how the chip rolled the bits, every result fails its own check. (We fixed exactly this for NMAxe miners in October 2026 — see the next question.)
• Difficulty far too high for the miner — on a fixed high-difficulty port, a small miner may need hours per share.
• Wrong algorithm. A SHA-256 miner pointed at a non-SHA-256 port connects but can never produce a valid share.
• Faulty chip or firmware. Try a reboot, then a firmware reflash.

If the shares count stays at zero on a low-difficulty port (our 999x ports), post in the chat with your worker name and we'll check the pool logs.

Modern miners change some bits of the block header's version field to get more work out of each job — this is version rolling, the open form of AsicBoost. When a miner connects, it asks the pool which bits it may change using mining.configure (BIP-310). The pool answers with a mask.

BIP-320 reserves 16 bits — bits 13 to 28 — for this, which is the mask 1fffe000. That's what BCMonster offers on every SHA-256 coin, the same as CKPool and most large pools.

Until October 2026 we advertised 3fffe000, which also includes bit 29. Our share checker never used bit 29, so most miners didn't notice — but NMAxe firmware cleared that bit from every job and dropped every result. Offering the standard mask fixed it with no change for anyone else.

Since BIP-9 (2016), the top three bits of the version field are set to 001, which reads as 0x20000000 in hex. The bits below are free for miners to signal support for upgrades — and, since BIP-320, bits 13–28 can be rolled for AsicBoost. That's why you'll see versions like 0x2fffe000 or 0x31750202 in block explorers: the miner rolled some of those bits while hashing.

The miner sent a share the pool has already counted — the same job, extranonce, time, nonce and version. It usually happens when a miner re-sends shares after a reconnect, or when a firmware bug submits the same result twice. A few right after a pool restart are harmless. A steady stream means the firmware needs an update.

The pool re-hashed your share and it didn't meet the difficulty you were assigned. There are two very different cases:

• Slightly low (say 800 against 1,000): the pool raised your difficulty and the miner sent a share it found just before it noticed. Occasional and normal.
• Absurdly low (numbers like 2.6e-10): the miner and pool built different block headers, so the hash is effectively random. That's a firmware or configuration fault — a miner that only ever produces these will never earn anything. Reboot it, then reflash its firmware.

When a pool restarts, every miner reconnects, receives new jobs, and starts again from its starting difficulty. Shares still in flight from the old connection reference jobs that no longer exist, and some miners re-send them. A burst of stale, duplicate or low-difficulty rejects in the first minute or two is normal. If rejects continue after a few minutes, it's worth checking the miner.

It's a message a miner sends to ask for a particular share difficulty. Bitaxe, NMAxe and many small miners send one when they connect. On ports with a fixed starting difficulty, BCMonster uses the port's value. On the low-floor 999x ports, which are built for small miners, the suggestion is used as the starting point. Either way, vardiff then adjusts it to your actual hashrate.

The pool gives each connection a unique extranonce1, so no two miners ever do the same work. The miner fills in extranonce2 itself, changing it whenever it runs out of nonces. Both go into the coinbase transaction. Pools choose their own sizes — commonly 4 to 8 bytes each — and some miners, such as Antminer S21s and Whatsminers, need a larger extranonce2, which BCMonster gives them automatically. Correctly written firmware works with any sensible size.

Each mining.notify gives the miner a new job. When the clean jobs flag is true, a new block has been found and every older job is now worthless — the miner should drop them immediately. When it's false, the pool is just refreshing the job (for example, to include new transactions) and older work is still valid for a short while.

• Subscribe and authorize lines — confirm the miner reached the pool and the username was accepted.
• Job or notify lines — new jobs every few seconds to a minute mean the connection is alive.
• “Share accepted” / “share rejected” lines with a reason — the reason tells you which of the questions above applies.
• Version mask lines — the mask the pool offered (ours is 1fffe000).

A screenshot of those lines in the chat is the fastest way for us to help.

Every 2,016 blocks, Bitcoin compares how long those blocks took with the target of two weeks (2,016 × 10 minutes). If they came faster, difficulty rises by the same proportion; slower, it falls. A single change is capped at a factor of 4 either way. Between adjustments, difficulty doesn't move at all — so a big jump in hashrate shows up as faster blocks until the next retarget.

Bitcoin Cash adjusts difficulty every block. Its history:

• August 2017: launched with an emergency difficulty adjustment (EDA) that let difficulty drop fast, but it caused wild swings.
• November 2017: replaced by a rolling 144-block average.
• November 15, 2020: replaced by ASERT (aserti3-2d).

ASERT raises or lowers difficulty exponentially depending on whether the chain is ahead of or behind schedule, with a two-day half-life. It's smooth and hard to game, which matters for a coin that shares SHA-256 hashrate with a much bigger chain.

eCash inherited ASERT from Bitcoin Cash and added real-time targeting (RTT), which makes a block harder to find if it comes too soon after the previous one. That's why a share that beats the listed network difficulty on XEC isn't always a block — see the XEC question under Coin Histories.

DigiByte retargets every block, and each of its five mining algorithms has its own difficulty. The goal is for the chain as a whole to produce a block every 15 seconds, with each algorithm finding roughly a fifth of them — so SHA-256 miners see a block about every 75 seconds. DigiByte introduced fast per-block retargeting as DigiShield in 2014, which was later adopted by Dogecoin, Zcash and others.

Peercoin runs proof of work and proof of stake side by side, and each has its own difficulty that adjusts every block. Proof-of-work blocks are a smaller part of the chain, so the PoW difficulty reacts quickly when SHA-256 miners arrive or leave.

On a small SHA-256 coin, one large miner can be a big slice of the whole network. When they switch on, blocks come fast and difficulty climbs; when they switch off, blocks slow down until difficulty falls again. Coins that retarget every block, like Bitcoin II, can swing by many times in a few hours. For a solo miner that's an opportunity: the moments right after a big miner leaves are when your odds are best.

Bitcoin's retarget only looks at the timestamps of the first and last blocks in each 2,016-block period, and the two periods don't overlap. A majority of miners could abuse that by faking timestamps to drive difficulty down and mine blocks far faster than every 10 minutes. It has never been exploited on Bitcoin, but it has been used against smaller coins. BIP-54 closes it — see our BIP-54 section.

Surprisingly loose. On Bitcoin, a block's time must be later than the median of the previous 11 blocks, and no more than two hours ahead of the nodes' clocks. So block times can even appear to go backwards slightly. That's why explorers sometimes show a block “mined” a minute before the one beneath it.

A Bitcoin Improvement Proposal is a design document describing a change or standard for Bitcoin. Anyone can write one. Some change consensus rules (like SegWit), others only describe conventions, such as BIP-39 seed phrases or the BIP-320 version-rolling bits. A BIP being published doesn't mean it's active — consensus changes only take effect once the network adopts them.

A soft fork tightens the rules: blocks valid under the new rules are still valid to old nodes, so un-upgraded nodes keep following the chain. SegWit and Taproot were soft forks.

A hard fork loosens or changes the rules so old nodes reject the new blocks. If everyone doesn't upgrade, the chain splits into two coins — that's how Bitcoin Cash was born in 2017.

Before BIP-34, two coinbase transactions could be byte-for-byte identical, giving them the same transaction ID — which actually happened twice in 2010, and the duplicates made some coins unspendable. Requiring the height at the start of every coinbase makes each one unique. It's why every pool's coinbase begins with the block height, and it's one of the details BIP-54 tidies up further.

Since BIP-9, miners signal readiness by setting a version bit in the blocks they mine. SegWit needed 95% of blocks in a retarget period; Taproot used “Speedy Trial” with a 90% threshold. Signaling is coordination, not a vote on whether the change is good — what ultimately enforces new rules is the nodes people run. The 2017 SegWit fight showed that: users pushed a user-activated soft fork (BIP-148) when miner signaling stalled.

In May 2017, a group of companies and miners agreed in New York to activate SegWit and then, three months later, double the block size with a hard fork. SegWit activated in August 2017, but the size increase lacked support from users and developers, and its backers cancelled it in November 2017, days before the planned fork. It's often remembered as the moment it became clear that miners and companies alone can't change Bitcoin's rules.

• Bitcoin: since SegWit, blocks are measured in weight — up to 4 million weight units, which works out to roughly 1.5–2.5 MB in practice depending on the transaction mix.
• Bitcoin Cash: forked with 8 MB, raised to 32 MB in 2018, and since May 2024 uses an adaptive limit (ABLA) that grows with real usage from a 32 MB floor.

Bigger blocks hold more transactions — and more transaction fees for whoever mines them.

Your miner hashes just 80 bytes, over and over:

• Version (4 bytes) — rule signaling plus the bits used for version rolling
• Previous block hash (32 bytes) — this is what chains blocks together
• Merkle root (32 bytes) — a fingerprint of every transaction in the block
• Time (4 bytes)
• Bits (4 bytes) — the difficulty target in compact form
• Nonce (4 bytes) — the number the miner keeps changing

The transactions themselves aren't hashed each time — only the merkle root that summarises them.

Every transaction is hashed, then the hashes are paired up and hashed together, again and again, until one hash is left: the merkle root. Change any transaction and the root changes. Because the coinbase is one of those transactions, changing the extranonce in the coinbase gives the miner a brand-new merkle root — and a fresh set of 4 billion nonces to try.

A modern miner exhausts all 4.29 billion nonces in well under a millisecond. It then changes something else so the header is new: it rolls version bits, bumps the extranonce2 (changing the merkle root), or occasionally nudges the time. Each change opens another 4.29 billion nonces. That's why the version mask and extranonce sizes matter so much to fast miners.

Bits stores the target as a compact number — like scientific notation, with one byte for the size and three for the digits. A block is valid when its hash, read as a number, is at or below that target. Difficulty is just a friendlier way of saying the same thing: how many times harder the current target is than the easiest one Bitcoin started with.

A valid hash must be smaller than the target, and the target is tiny. Small numbers written in fixed-width hex start with lots of zeros. Today a Bitcoin block hash starts with around 19 hex zeros. Each extra zero means the hash was about 16 times harder to find.

If a block is replaced by a competing block (an orphan), its coinbase reward disappears. If those coins had already been spent, every later transaction depending on them would vanish too. So Bitcoin, and coins derived from it, make coinbase rewards wait 100 blocks before they can be spent. That's the “Maturing” status you see on the Blocks page before a payout goes out.

The coinbase input has a free-form field that every pool uses for the same few things: the block height (required), the extranonce space, and usually a short tag. Ours reads /BCMonster/, which is how explorers know who mined a block. The outputs then pay out the reward. Merge-mined coins also need a commitment in the coinbase, which is how one hash can secure two chains.

If one party controls more hashrate than the rest of the network combined, they can mine a private chain faster than everyone else and then publish it, replacing recent blocks. With that power they can:

• Double-spend their own coins — pay an exchange, then erase the payment by replacing the blocks it was in.
• Censor transactions or orphan other miners' blocks.

They can't steal coins from other people's addresses, spend coins without the keys, or create coins beyond the block reward — every node would reject those blocks no matter how much hashrate made them.

Yes — on smaller proof-of-work coins, never on Bitcoin. Well-known cases:

• Bitcoin Gold (May 2018): attackers double-spent millions of dollars' worth of BTG at exchanges, and it was attacked again in 2020.
• Ethereum Classic: attacked in January 2019 and several times in August 2020, with reorganisations thousands of blocks deep.

The common thread: coins whose total hashrate could be rented cheaply from a hashrate marketplace for a few hours.

It depends on how much hashrate protects the chain and how much money is at stake. On Bitcoin, one confirmation is fine for small amounts and six is the long-standing rule for large ones. Smaller SHA-256 coins are cheaper to attack, so exchanges often require dozens or hundreds of confirmations for them. Mined coins are different again: they always wait for coinbase maturity (100 blocks on most of our coins) before they can be spent.

Described by researchers Ittay Eyal and Emin Gün Sirer in 2013, selfish mining means keeping found blocks secret and releasing them strategically to make honest miners waste work on blocks that will be orphaned. In theory a large enough miner could earn more than its fair share without reaching 51%. In practice, it's detectable, it risks the miner's own blocks, and there's no confirmed case of it on Bitcoin.

A miner submits ordinary shares to a pool but secretly throws away any share that would have been a full block. The pool keeps paying them for shares while losing the blocks, which costs every honest member. It's one reason pools watch for miners whose luck is impossibly bad over long periods — and one reason solo mining, where you keep your own block, can't be attacked this way.

Mostly safer. Namecoin, for example, is protected by a meaningful share of Bitcoin's hashrate because miners can secure it at no extra cost. But it cuts both ways: a large pool can attack a small merge-mined chain for free. In January 2012 a large pool did exactly that to a merge-mined coin called CoiledCoin, effectively ending it. Merge mining is safest when it's spread across many independent pools.

Some do. eCash adds Avalanche finality: staking nodes vote on blocks, and once a block is finalised, no amount of hashrate can replace it. Other coins have used checkpoints or limits on how deep a reorganisation nodes will accept. Bitcoin uses neither — its protection comes purely from the sheer amount of hashrate behind it.

• August 1, 2017: Bitcoin Cash (BCH) splits from Bitcoin over block size.
• November 15, 2018: Bitcoin SV (BSV) splits from BCH after the “hash war”.
• November 15, 2020: Bitcoin ABC's chain splits from BCH over a proposed coinbase rule; it becomes BCHA, and in July 2021 is renamed eCash (XEC).

All three share Bitcoin's history up to 2017, use SHA-256, and can be mined with the same ASICs. BCH2 (Bitcoin Cash II) is a separate, much newer chain — see its entry under Coin Histories.

eCash's consensus rules require part of every coinbase to go elsewhere. On a current block template:

• 32% to the eCash miner fund, which pays for development
• 10% to staking rewards for Avalanche nodes
• 58% to the miner who found the block

A block that doesn't pay those outputs is invalid, so every eCash pool builds them in. The reward BCMonster shows for an XEC block is the miner's 58%, not the full amount.

When BCHA became eCash in July 2021, it was re-denominated: 1 BCHA became 1,000,000 XEC. The smallest unit didn't change — 1 XEC is simply 100 satoshis — so XEC shows only two decimal places. Nothing about the value changed; the numbers just became friendlier for everyday payments.

Bitcoin Cash schedules network upgrades once a year, every May 15. Notable ones include CashTokens (May 2023), which added native tokens and NFTs, and the adaptive block size limit (May 2024). Miners and pools must run an upgraded node before each date — an outdated node will follow the wrong chain, which is why we watch upgrade dates closely.

Over time, roughly the same. Hashrate moves between SHA-256 coins until the reward per terahash evens out, and BCH's ASERT difficulty reacts within hours. Short windows can favour one or the other. For a solo miner the bigger difference is the odds: BCH's difficulty is far lower than Bitcoin's, so the same miner has a much better chance of finding a (smaller) block.

The energy is the security. To rewrite Bitcoin's history, an attacker would have to redo the work — burning a comparable amount of real-world energy. Miners spend more when the reward is worth more, so energy use tracks the price and the block reward, not the number of transactions. That's why “energy per transaction” comparisons are misleading: one more transaction doesn't add measurable energy.

It depends on the power source, and estimates vary widely. Mining is unusual among big electricity users: it can be built anywhere with a network connection and switched off in seconds. That pushes miners toward the cheapest power, which is often surplus hydro, wind or solar that would otherwise be wasted — but in some places it's fossil power. The honest answer is that its footprint is real, and how green it is comes down to where the hashrate sits.

Large mining sites, especially in Texas, sign agreements to switch off when the grid is stressed. They're paid or credited for curtailing, and the power goes to homes and hospitals instead. You can sometimes see it in Bitcoin's hashrate chart: a dip on the hottest summer afternoons. A data centre can't do that; a miner can, because a few lost hours only cost a few hours of reward.

Oil wells often produce natural gas in places with no pipeline, so it's burned off in a flare — or vented. Some companies put generators and miners at the well instead, turning that gas into electricity on the spot. Burning it in a generator also converts methane, a much stronger greenhouse gas, into CO₂ more completely than many flares do.

A single-chip Bitaxe uses roughly 15–25 watts — about the same as an LED floodlight — so running it all month costs a dollar or two in most places. Multi-chip home miners use roughly 60–300 W, and a full Antminer 3,000 W or more. Multiply watts × 24 × 30 ÷ 1,000 to get kWh per month, then multiply by your electricity rate.

The usual route is to send the coins from your wallet to an exchange that supports that coin, sell them there, and withdraw to your bank. Before you send:

• Check the exchange actually lists that exact coin. Smaller coins like BCH2 or BC2 are only on a few exchanges, and sending a coin to an exchange that doesn't support it can lose it.
• Send a small test amount first.
• Watch the exchange's deposit confirmations and withdrawal fees.

That's your call, and nobody can tell you what prices will do. Many miners do both: sell enough to cover electricity and hardware, and hold the rest. Selling your costs as you go means a price drop can't force you to sell everything at the bottom. Whatever you choose, keep the coins you hold in a wallet you control, not on an exchange.

Tax rules vary by country, so check with a local tax professional — but almost everywhere, good records help. Keep:

• The date and amount of each payout or block reward, and its value in your currency that day.
• Your hardware purchases and electricity bills.
• The date, amount and price of anything you sell or spend.

Your BCMonster payments page and your wallet's transaction history give you the dates, amounts and transaction IDs.

Yes. Many online shops and some local businesses accept Bitcoin (often over Lightning for small amounts), Bitcoin Cash and a few others, either directly or through a payment processor. Gift-card services let you turn coins into store credit at large retailers. For anything larger, compare the rate you're getting with simply selling on an exchange.

Usually, yes — through an exchange that lists the coin with a BTC or USDT trading pair. Small coins can have thin order books, so a large sell can move the price against you; selling in smaller pieces or using limit orders helps. Check that the exchange's deposits for that coin are open before sending, since smaller listings are sometimes paused for wallet maintenance.

Buy from the manufacturer's own store, an authorised reseller listed on the manufacturer's site, or a well-known retailer with a real returns policy. Open-source home miners like the Bitaxe are sold by many independent shops — look for ones with long histories and plenty of real reviews. Paying by card or another method with buyer protection is safer than a bank wire or crypto, which you can't get back.

Fake mining-hardware shops are one of the most common crypto scams. Red flags:

• Prices far below everyone else's for current models.
• Payment only by crypto, wire transfer or gift cards.
• A brand-new website, a copied manufacturer logo, or a domain name that's close to — but not exactly — the real one.
• Pressure to pay quickly, or “stock reserved for you for one hour”.

If a deal looks too good, check the seller against the manufacturer's official reseller list before paying anything.

Pre-orders lock in a price months before delivery. By the time the machine arrives, difficulty has usually risen and newer models may be cheaper, so the profit you calculated at order time often shrinks. Delivery dates also slip. Pre-ordering makes most sense for large buyers with firm power contracts; for home miners, buying in-stock hardware you can plug in today is usually the safer bet.

• Shipping and import duties — many miners ship from overseas, and customs charges can add a lot.
• Power work — a full-size ASIC usually needs a dedicated 240 V circuit.
• Cooling and noise — fans, ducting or a sound-proofed box.
• Spares — fans and power supplies are the parts that fail most.

Add these to the price before working out how long the miner takes to pay for itself.

A hosting company runs your miner in its facility for a monthly fee, usually priced per kWh. You get industrial power rates and no noise at home, and you can still point the miner at any pool you like — including BCMonster. The risks are the operator: check how long they've been running, whether you can visit or get your machine back, and what happens if they shut down. Unlike cloud mining, you own a real, identifiable machine.

New machines from the major manufacturers usually come with a limited warranty, often around six months to a year, but it can be voided by custom firmware, overclocking, immersion cooling or physical damage. Used machines usually come with none. Keep your receipt and the original serial labels, and read the terms before installing third-party firmware.