Imagine someone who refuses to use the national grid and decides to install a solar power generation plant on the rooftop.

For that person, the power generated is coming directly from the sun without any combining effort from neighbours or government via the national grid.

The person generates and enjoys all the power except the she chooses to share with a neighbor.

So also, Solo Mining is an individualized process where a miner decides to mine cryptocurrency without external help other than being part of the network.

How does it work?

A miner chooses to connect the mining equipment, which is made up of complex and customised computer systems, directly to the Bitcoin wallet (sun, in the energy generation illustration).

And then the race to find and open blocks start. Remember, blocks are found by solving computational problems created in the network as a result of activities and transactions carried out by users in any particular blockchain platform.

For every block found, the miner gets all the reward: the cryptocurrencies mined stays with the miner and not shared by any network of individuals.

Solo Mining using a Pool

There’s another kind of Solo Mining where some pools offer the ability to mine in solo mode without the need to have their own node.

This way, you are still paying the pool the fee for it’s service, but retain the reward without sharing it with other miners like Pool Mining.

An example of a Solo “Pool” Mining company is CKPool.

You can also see Pool Mining and the differences between Solo Mining and Pool Mining.