I've been running Bitcoin infrastructure for my home miners and opened the solo pool side of it publicly as EchoPool about a year ago.
Website: https://echopool.org/Stratum: solo.echopool.org:3333
EchoPool is a CKPool-based solo mining pool backed by my own Bitcoin Knots full node. It's intended primarily for home miners running Bitaxe, Avalon Nano, FutureBit, Antminer, Whatsminer, or similar hardware who want to solo mine directly against Bitcoin without using a custodial mining pool.
- - - - - - - - -
How payouts workEchoPool uses direct coinbase payouts.
When your miner receives a mining job, the coinbase transaction already specifies where the block reward will go if that job finds a valid Bitcoin block.
- 99% of the block reward goes directly to the Bitcoin address supplied as your Stratum username.
- 1% goes to EchoPool for operating the pool infrastructure.
There's no account balance, payout threshold, withdrawal request, or pool wallet holding your earnings. If your miner finds a block, the payout is part of the block itself.
You do not have to trust meOne of the main goals of EchoPool is to make as much of the mining path independently verifiable as practical. The website exposes a live Stratum mining job so you can decode the coinbase transaction yourself and verify that your mining address is actually included as a payout output before pointing any meaningful hashpower at the pool. The site also displays the current block height reported by my Bitcoin Knots node, so you can compare it with the current Bitcoin mainnet height and verify that the backend node is actually synchronized with the network.
The website includes instructions for decoding the coinbase, and miners such as Bitaxe/AxeOS can also inspect coinbase transactions directly.
In other words:
Don't trust the pool operator. Verify what the pool is actually doing. - - - - - - - - -
Connecting a minerUse:
stratum+tcp://solo.echopool.org:3333
Username:
YOUR_BITCOIN_ADDRESS.workername
The worker name is optional but useful if you have multiple miners.
Password can generally be anything, for example:
Example:
URL: stratum+tcp://solo.echopool.org:3333
Username: bc1qxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.bitaxe1
Password: x
- - - - - - - - -
What EchoPool is, and is notEchoPool is a true solo mining pool. Shares submitted by your miner are used for monitoring and accounting, but they do not earn proportional pool payouts.
You are attempting to find a Bitcoin block yourself. If another EchoPool miner finds a block, you do not receive part of that miner's reward. Likewise, if your miner finds a block, the reward belongs to you, minus the 1% pool fee encoded in the coinbase transaction.
This means small miners should understand the odds involved: A Bitaxe running a few TH/s is effectively a lottery miner. The expected time to find a block is extremely long, although every valid hash still has a chance of producing a valid block. EchoPool does not attempt to make solo mining sound more profitable than it is.
- - - - - - - - -
Infrastructure and transparencyThe pool currently consists of:
- CKPool providing the Stratum mining interface
- A Bitcoin Knots full node providing the Bitcoin backend
- Live Bitcoin Knots block height displayed publicly on https://echopool.org
- Public worker and pool monitoring
- Live Stratum job data that can be inspected independently
- Direct coinbase construction so miners can verify where a successful block would pay
I deliberately run Bitcoin Knots rather than Bitcoin Core, so if anyone is interested in the node side of the setup, that's also fair game for discussion.
The block height shown on the website comes from the node backing the pool. It gives miners a simple way to confirm that the node is following current Bitcoin mainnet tip rather than relying on a generic "online" indicator. From the miner's perspective it's standard Stratum V1, but the node rejects non-standard, data-heavy, or "spam" transactions (e.g. certain inscriptions, ordinals, and large OP_RETURN data carriers)
- - - - - - - - -
Why another solo pool?I built this primarily because I enjoy running Bitcoin infrastructure and wanted a solo pool where I could inspect and control the entire stack myself, from the Bitcoin Knots full node, through CKPool, to the jobs ultimately sent to my miners.
The design goals are:
- Simple Stratum V1 connectivity
- No registration
- No custodial balances
- Direct coinbase payout
- Transparent 1% operator fee
- Easy independent payout verification
- Public visibility into the backend node's current block height
- Friendly to Bitaxe and other home-mining hardware
- Self-hosted Bitcoin infrastructure rather than relying on somebody else's node
I also run my own Bitaxe miners against EchoPool, so this is the same infrastructure I use for my own solo mining.
- - - - - - - - -
Operating historyEchoPool has been running for nearly a year, originally as infrastructure for my own miners before I began allowing others to connect.
It currently has roughly 28 TH/s of hashpower pointed at it from a small group of public miners in addition to my own hardware. Most of those miners found the pool through some early community posts when I first opened it publicly.
So while EchoPool is still a very small solo pool, it isn't a new or temporary test deployment. The node, CKPool backend, monitoring, and public Stratum service have been operating continuously as real mining infrastructure.
- - - - - - - - -
Pool addressWebsitehttps://echopool.org/If anyone here wants to test it, inspect the Stratum jobs, decode the coinbase, compare the node height against mainnet, or point out anything that could be improved, I'm interested in feedback.
Technical questions are welcome. I'm happy to discuss CKPool, Bitcoin Knots, the node/pool architecture, share difficulty behavior, coinbase construction, monitoring, or the home-mining side of the setup.
