P2Pool Main vs Mini vs Nano vs Solo: Which Should You Mine?

Once you decide to mine Monero without a centralized pool, the next question is which flavor: P2Pool’s main chain, mini, nano, or fully solo. Forum threads about this usually start with “I’ve been mining for two days and got nothing.” The choice does not change what you earn on average, but it changes how long you wait and how bumpy the ride is. This guide puts real numbers on it.

The one-sentence answer

Use the P2Pool share time calculator with your hashrate. If your average share time on a sidechain is longer than one day, move to the next smaller one. That rule comes straight from the P2Pool FAQ, and for most home miners it points to mini or nano.

How the P2Pool sidechains differ

Each sidechain is an independent P2Pool network with its own miners, difficulty and PPLNS window. They do not share shares; you pick one with a command-line flag.

The hashrate figures are derived from sidechain difficulty on P2Pool Observer at the time of writing and change constantly. The block intervals follow from comparing each sidechain’s hashrate with Monero’s network difficulty.

The trade-off is visible right there. Main finds Monero blocks every half hour or so, but its share difficulty is so high that small miners rarely land a share. Nano makes shares easy to find, but the whole sidechain finds a Monero block less than once a day.

Share times by hashrate

Your share time is the sidechain difficulty divided by your hashrate. Using the same snapshot:

Applying the one-day rule:

• Around 1 kH/s: nano is the only sidechain that fits, and even there it is borderline.
• Around 10 kH/s: mini or nano. Main would leave you waiting nearly a week between shares, longer than the 6-hour window that holds them.
• Around 50 kH/s: mini is comfortable; main is just over the line.
• 200 kH/s and up: main works well.

Key point: A share only earns you money if the sidechain finds a Monero block while that share is still inside the PPLNS window. If your share time is much longer than the window, many shares will expire unpaid and your income becomes very lumpy. That is why the one-day rule exists.

Why the average income is the same

Every sidechain splits each Monero block it finds among miners in proportion to the difficulty of their shares in the window. Over a long period, your share of all P2Pool rewards equals your share of P2Pool’s hashrate, and P2Pool as a whole earns blocks in line with its share of the network. Choosing mini over main does not give you a bigger slice; it just cuts the slice into more frequent, smaller pieces.

The P2Pool README adds a caveat: if a sidechain’s hashrate is too low to find Monero blocks more often than its window length, some shares will never pay. Over time this still averages out to normal pool income, but in the short run it adds variance. With mini currently finding blocks about every 7 hours against a 6-hour window, expect dry spells.

The hidden cost of tiny payouts

Every P2Pool payout arrives as a separate output in your wallet. Many small outputs are fine to receive, but each one adds to the transaction size and fee when you later spend or consolidate them. Monero’s own docs note that consolidating P2Pool payouts can be expensive.

This gets more important after the FCMP++ hard fork, because each spent input will carry a bigger proof. P2Pool developer SChernykh estimates the cost of spending an output roughly doubles. The planned P2Pool v5 tackles this by rounding payouts on mini and nano to multiples of 0.0006 XMR, choosing who gets rounded up so that totals are fair over time:

• Small miners get paid in fewer blocks, but each payout is larger and loses less to fees.
• Expected income before fees is unchanged.
• Main-chain payouts already exceed 0.0006 XMR, so they are essentially unaffected.

P2Pool v5 is only a beta on the FCMP++ stressnet for now. When the mainnet fork date is set, it will become a required upgrade.

Tip: Consolidate small outputs when network fees are low rather than waiting until you need to make a payment. Sweeping many outputs into one transaction from time to time keeps future payments cheap.

Solo mining: the lottery option

Solo mining means your own node builds block templates and you keep the full reward when you find a block, currently 0.6 XMR plus fees. Nothing is shared and nothing is paid until you win.

Monero’s own docs call solo mining “the purest, most decentralized and private form of mining”, while noting it requires the most patience. The math shows why. Monero produces about 720 blocks per day. With network hashrate around 6.3 GH/s at the time of writing:

These are averages. Block finding follows a random process, so you could find one next week or go three times the average without one. A miner who quits after eight months of nothing, just before the expected block, is a classic story in mining forums.

How to solo mine

1. Monero GUI or CLI. monerod has a built-in miner: type start_mining YOUR_ADDRESS THREADS in the daemon console. It is the simplest route but not the fastest.
2. XMRig against your own node. Set "daemon": true in the pool entry, point url at your node’s RPC port (for example 127.0.0.1:18081), and put your address in user. XMRig 6.25.0 and later include support for the FCMP++ hard fork in solo mode.
3. P2Pool as a solo miner. If you run a large farm, P2Pool main with enough hashrate gets you most of the independence of solo mining with far smoother income.

Warning: Never expose your node’s unrestricted RPC port (18081) to the internet so remote rigs can solo mine. Keep it on your LAN or behind a VPN.

Comparing all four options

For comparison, a centralized pool pays steadily above a threshold but charges a fee and concentrates block template control in one operator. We cover why that matters in our article on hashrate centralization in the mining category.

Practical recommendations

1. One laptop or older PC: P2Pool nano, or accept that mining is mostly a learning exercise at this level.
2. One modern desktop (5–30 kH/s): P2Pool mini or nano. Check the calculator; around 10 kH/s both are reasonable.
3. Several desktops or a home server farm (30–150 kH/s): P2Pool mini.
4. Large farms and data-center servers: P2Pool main, or solo if you can handle the variance.

Whatever you choose, run your own node, keep your mining wallet separate from your everyday wallet, and check your stats on the matching observer site (p2pool.observer, mini.p2pool.observer or nano.p2pool.observer). Switching later is just a restart with a different flag.