There are dozens of Bitcoin mining pools. Why build another one? Because most of them custody your coins, charge fees that compound over years, and live in jurisdictions where users have no recourse. Maenpolder is the answer to a question that nagged me for months: why does mining infrastructure feel less sovereign than the network it secures?
The problem with the current pool landscape
If you mine Bitcoin today, your options are roughly:
- Custodial pools (Foundry USA, AntPool, F2Pool, ViaBTC). They collect block rewards, then send you a cut later. They can — in theory — freeze, withhold, or be subpoenaed for your earnings.
- OCEAN, the noble exception that paid out via TIDES (multi-output coinbase). Excellent technology — but US-based, and their core protocol (DATUM Prime) is closed-source.
- Solo CKPool by Con Kolivas — the original solo pool, no-frills, run by one person on faith for over a decade. Zero web UI. Brilliant but spartan.
- Public-pool — community fork of CKPool with a frontend. Solo-only, US-based, alpha quality.
None of them tick all the boxes for what I personally wanted: European jurisdiction, full transparency, zero custody, beautiful and informative UX, GDPR-compliant by design, and 0% pool fee for the foundation. So I built it.
And in the Netherlands?
The Dutch Bitcoin community has its own pool initiatives that share much of this DNA. Noderunners runs a community-driven pool tied to a podcast and meetup ecosystem; they've already found a block, which is a real achievement at small-pool hashrate. Satoshi Radio Pool targets home miners with a similar non-custodial focus. Maenpolder doesn't aim to replace either — more EU/NL pools is healthier than fewer, and centralisation toward a handful of large US pools is the real issue. Where we differ: permanent 0% fee (sponsor-funded, not a promotional rate), TLS stratum on port 3334, and a dashboard built specifically for the per-share, per-worker visibility solo miners care about.
Three commitments that won't change
1. Non-custodial, always
When a Maenpolder miner finds a block, the entire reward — 3.125 BTC subsidy plus transaction fees — flows directly to your bitcoin address through the coinbase transaction of that block. The Bitcoin protocol enforces this. Maenpolder has no wallet. There is no "pending balance," no withdrawal button, no minimum payout. We literally cannot hold your coins, even if we wanted to.
2. Open and auditable
The pool runs on ckpool (open source, battle-tested by Con Kolivas). The dashboard is custom Flask code we'll publish on GitHub. Every block we find is recorded immutably in blocks-found.json on this server, viewable at /blocks. Our 0% pool fee is not a teaser — it's the entire business model. Sponsorships from partners like Cryptoken and Solo Satoshi keep the lights on.
3. Privacy by design, not as a feature
No tracking cookies. No Google Analytics. No third-party widgets that profile users. Fonts are served via Bunny Fonts (GDPR-compliant). The visitor counter you see in the footer uses a daily-rotating cryptographic salt — yesterday's hashes are mathematically unsalvageable. We aggressively delete what we don't need. Read the policy; you can audit every line.
Why "Maenpolder"?
The name combines two metaphors:
- Maen — Welsh for stone, evoking the megaliths of ancient Wales. Bitcoin blocks are stones in a chain.
- Polder — Dutch for land reclaimed from water. The Netherlands has been winning territory from the sea for a thousand years through cooperation, engineering, and patience.
A Bitcoin mining pool that reclaims blocks from the network, stone by stone, polder by polder. That's the metaphor and the operating principle.
What's already live
- Self-hosted on our own hardware and network in a Dutch datacentre — no cloud dependency, no managed-hosting middleman
- Bitcoin Core 31.0 with txindex, multi-region peers, ZMQ block relay (sub-200ms latency)
- ckpool stratum on
maenpolder.com:3333— connect with your bitcoin address as username - Live dashboard with per-worker stats, hashrate trends, network context (halving countdown, mempool fees, block-time pulse, difficulty adjustment, luck meter)
- Multi-language (English, Nederlands)
- HTTPS with HSTS, security headers, rate-limiting
- Telegram alerting for block-finds and pool issues
- Watchdog services with auto-recovery
What's coming
- Stratum V2 endpoint with Translator Proxy — when SRI's app-layer reaches production-grade. We refuse to handle real money on alpha software, but the infrastructure is being researched.
- PPLNS pool mode — for miners who want shared rewards. Will be deployed only with non-custodial multi-output coinbase, no exceptions.
- Multi-region stratum — EU, US, APAC nodes for low-latency mining worldwide.
- Open-sourcing the dashboard on GitHub. Audit our code. Submit pull requests.
Try it
If you have a Bitaxe, NerdQAxe, an old S9 in a closet, or a serious miner farm — connect to stratum+tcp://maenpolder.com:3333 with your bitcoin address as username. That's it. No signup. No KYC. No fee. The block reward, if you find one, lands in your wallet 100 confirmations later.
If you don't mine but want to support another non-custodial Dutch pool option alongside Noderunners and Satoshi Radio: share this site, tell your fellow miners, or send a tip to the address in the footer. Sponsorships and affiliate purchases through our partners (Cryptoken, Solo Satoshi) keep the pool free.
The blockchain doesn't care who finds the next block. But somebody will. Why not someone with the same values you hold? Why not us?