Home Bitcoin Node Solo Mining Setup Guide

Once inserted, in Etcher press Select target.

Select your USB drive. BE CAREFUL HERE! If you select the wrong drive you might delete valuable data. Check the size of it to match your drive. Then press Select.

Last chance to double check everything is ok. Then press Flash!

If your USB drive is large it will give you a warning — double check it's correct and then press "Yes, I'm sure".

Now wait for it to finish; it could be a couple minutes depending on the speed of the drive.

Now that it's done, grab your spare PC (or whatever you are installing it onto) and put the USB drive into a USB port plus ethernet. I will be using a spare Lenovo notebook.

This part will be different for everyone. You need to boot into your computer's boot menu. When your computer starts up there is normally a screen for a short time saying press F12, Enter, or Del to enter setup/BIOS. Google the key if you cannot figure it out. We need to boot off the USB drive you inserted. On this Lenovo notebook it's Enter, then F12 once in the menu, then select your USB.

If you are really stuck here, try googling "How to boot COMPUTER BRAND NAME into bios/boot menu".

You will quickly see the GRUB boot loader and it will load automatically. In a couple seconds you will start to see a bunch of text on the display. If you pressed a key by mistake just press Enter on the first option (use arrow keys if you moved it).

You will see this menu now. Select the disk on the computer — don't select the USB drive. In this case it's the internal NVME drive. Select the number beside it and press Enter. IT WILL ERASE THE SELECTED DRIVE WITHOUT CONFIRMATION!!!

Now go grab a cup of tea while it installs. Depending on the speed of the drives it can take a while — around 16 mins for ours.

When it's done it will tell you to press any key to restart. After you press a key, remove the USB drive before it boots back up.

When it boots up you will see a bunch of text on the display, then a login page.

When you see "umbrel login" it's done booting up.

Now that you see the umbrel login, go back to your main computer to finish the setup — you don't need to touch the computer running Umbrel anymore! In your browser visit https://umbrel.local or http://umbrel.local

You should see this screen. Press Start.

Fill in the information then press Create.

On the next screen press Next.

We are now at the main screen — click on the shop icon.

Type "bitcoin" in the search box then click on "Bitcoin Node".

Press Install.

When it's done installing you can click Open. It will bring you to a new page where the blockchain starts to download.

Once the page opens, at the bottom there will be: Home, Insights and Settings. Press Settings then Optimization. Scroll down a bit to find Prune Old Blocks and set it to 5GB. Then press Save changes.

This will make the final file size around 30GB.

Press Home at the bottom and you will see the blockchain download percentage. We can't start mining until it's 100%. But we can install the rest so it's ready to mine when it's done! Go to the next step.

We need to download Public Pool so your miners can connect to it. Press the shop icon again and search for "pool". You will see a small popup saying it requires Bitcoin Node. Press install Public Pool.

Once it's done, open the app. You'll be brought to the pool page showing the pool information to enter into your ASICs.

If you don't know how to use this, we have two guides:
How to setup the pool on Bitaxe
How to setup the pool on Nerdaxe

After you put the pool information into your ASICs you can watch the hash rates start to climb on this page in a couple minutes.

AGAIN, THIS ONLY WORKS ONCE THE BITCOIN NODE IS AT 100%.