Hey!, People often say home Bitcoin mining is dead. But what exactly has died: the possibility of making a profit at residential electricity rates, or the idea of running a miner at home?
Those feel like different questions. Someone trying to recover the cost of an ASIC has different priorities from someone running a Bitaxe to learn, experiment, or take a very small shot at finding a block.
The pool landscape reflects those different goals:
* **Braiins Pool**, formerly Slush Pool, represents the established pooled approach. FPPS makes rewards more predictable, although predictable revenue does not automatically mean profit.
* **Solo CKPool** keeps the solo route accessible without requiring everyone to operate their own pool infrastructure. With small hashrate, finding a block remains extremely unlikely.
* **OCEAN**, with DATUM, explores another priority: giving miners more control over their block templates while participating in pooled mining.
* **BTC PoW Lab Pool**, uses a Hybrid Solo model: 85% to the block finder, 10% to other eligible community miners, and 5% to the lab (yes, the team also runs an active research lab exploring potential mining improvements for the pool ionto SHA-256). The model shares part of a found block with the community.
These approaches change reward distribution, variance, or miner control. They don’t remove electricity costs, hardware costs, or network difficulty.
That makes me wonder whether home mining is becoming a collection of different activities: small-scale income where the economics work, heat reuse, hands-on learning, and hobby solo mining.
**If you mine at home today, what makes it worthwhile for you, and what would need to change for you to keep doing it over the next few years?**
