On Sunday 6 May 2026 — less than 48 hours ago — a single home miner running Public Pool on an Umbrel node solved Bitcoin block #948,146. The reward, 3.154586 BTC (worth roughly €214,000 at today's price), was paid in one coinbase output directly to the miner's address. No pool wallet. No custody. No fee deduction. The Bitcoin protocol moved €214k from nowhere to one Raspberry Pi, and that's it.
The on-chain proof
You can verify this yourself in any Bitcoin explorer, but here's what's actually on the chain:
Block: #948,146
Hash: 000000000000000000018a4288653582d065a580c89f91c51045d8b648b38a39
Time: 2026-05-06 09:28 UTC
Size: 1.66 MB · 2,768 transactions
Difficulty: 132.47 T
Coinbase scriptSig contains: "Public Pool on Umbrel"
Coinbase output: 3.154586 BTC → single bc1q… address (the miner)
Subsidy: 3.125 BTC
Fees: 0.029586 BTC (about 1% of total)
Total reward: ~ €214,000 at today's BTC price
That single coinbase output, paid directly to the home miner, is what "non-custodial solo mining" looks like at the protocol layer. There is no intermediate step. The pool didn't receive funds; the pool didn't redistribute; the pool didn't take a fee. The miner ran their own pool software on their own hardware, and the Bitcoin network paid them directly.
What the winning setup looked like
Public Pool is an open-source community fork of CKpool that ships as an Umbrel app. Anyone with a Raspberry Pi or small home-server can:
- Install Umbrel (Bitcoin home-server OS)
- Install Bitcoin Core via the Umbrel app store and let it sync (~2 days, ~700 GB)
- Install Public Pool from the Umbrel app store — boots a stratum endpoint on port 3333
- Point a Bitaxe (or any ASIC) at
your-pi-ip:3333with their bitcoin address as the username
The whole setup runs on a Raspberry Pi 4 with a USB SSD for ~€200 plus the miner. When you find a block, the entire reward goes directly to the bitcoin-address you configured. There's no pool wallet because you are the pool.
It's brilliant. It's also a hassle — most miners don't want to run their own Bitcoin Core node, manage a Raspberry Pi, do SSD swaps, deal with reorgs, monitor uptime, and learn the diagnostic toolchain.
Where Maenpolder fits
Maenpolder offers identical economics to "Public Pool on Umbrel" — single-output coinbase directly to your bitcoin-address, 0% pool fee, no custody, no withdrawal flow — but as a hosted endpoint instead of self-hosted. Trade-off:
| Aspect | Public Pool on Umbrel | Maenpolder |
|---|---|---|
| Pool fee | 0% | 0% |
| Custody | None (single-output coinbase) | None (single-output coinbase) |
| Setup time | ~2 days (Bitcoin Core IBD) | ~30 seconds |
| Hardware needed | Raspberry Pi + 1 TB SSD + Bitaxe | Just a Bitaxe |
| Storage upkeep | ~290 MB/day, you manage | We manage |
| Uptime | Your home internet | Self-hosted on owned hardware in NL datacentre, with watchdog monitoring |
| TLS stratum | Manual | Built in (port 3334) |
| Jurisdiction | Yours | Netherlands / EU |
The Sunday-6-May winner did it the maximally-sovereign way: their own node, their own pool, their own coinbase. Respect. For miners who want the same economics without the operational lift, Maenpolder is the lower-barrier alternative — same protocol-enforced reward path, without the Pi maintenance.
Why right now is a slightly-better window for solo
The numbers as of 8 May 2026:
- Network hashrate: 940 EH/s — still below the 1 ZH/s peak, with hashrate having slipped on 19 April and not yet recovered. That's about 5% lower than the ATH.
- Difficulty: 132.47 T — adjusted −2.3% on 1 May, the largest downward retarget since November 2024. Next adjustment estimated for around 15-17 May, projected only +0.85%.
- Hashprice: ~$37.5/PH/s/day — climbed from $34.4 last week. Miners are earning more per terahash this week than last, despite the lower aggregate hashrate.
- Block-time: 10m 28s avg — slightly slow, as expected after a difficulty drop with hashrate not yet recovered.
For solo home miners, the takeaway is simple: your odds-per-share are roughly 7-10% better today than they were two weeks ago. Not life-changing, but not nothing — exponential variance is variance. A few percent helps.
Setup at Maenpolder
Two settings in your Bitaxe's web UI under Settings → Stratum:
Host: maenpolder.com
Port: 3334 (TLS — recommended)
or 3333 (plaintext)
Username: your-bitcoin-address[.optional-worker-name]
Password: xSave and reboot. Within 30 seconds your hashrate appears live on maenpolder.com, with real-time time-to-block math, a next-block-reward estimator pulling from the live mempool, and per-worker stats.
If your miner finds a block at any time, the coinbase output goes directly to the bitcoin-address you used as your stratum username. You'll see it on /blocks, in your Telegram alerts (if you set those up), and ten confirmations later in your wallet. Just like the May-6 home-miner, but without you needing to also be a Bitcoin Core sysadmin.
One last thing
Block #948,146 is the kind of event Maenpolder was built for. A non-zero number of home miners are going to win in 2026 — somebody finds a block every ten minutes, and a small fraction of those finds will land in a Bitaxe / Raspberry-Pi / NerdQAxe setup. The 6 May winner did it the maximalist way. The next one might do it on a hosted pool. Either is a real, protocol-enforced victory — and either is a fundamentally different transaction than "Foundry took a fee, then sent you your share two weeks later".
The lottery is real. The prizes are real. The path to playing without trusting any wallet but Bitcoin's own protocol is wide open in 2026. Choose accordingly.