How to mine BCH

Solo mine Bitcoin Cash with any SHA-256 ASIC, in about five minutes

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is mined exactly like Bitcoin, with SHA-256, so any Bitcoin ASIC can mine it without changes. SegPool runs a solo BCH pool: when your miner finds a block, 99% of the reward goes straight to your address inside that block, and we keep 1%. There are no balances to withdraw and no minimum payout.

1. Get a BCH address

Install a Bitcoin Cash wallet, such as Electron Cash, and copy a receiving address. That address is your account: there is no sign-up, and the block reward is paid to it directly. Use a wallet that holds Bitcoin Cash: a Bitcoin bc1… address or an eCash (XEC) ecash: address won't work.

2. Turn it into your username

Most BCH wallets show addresses as CashAddr, starting bitcoincash:q (or bitcoincash:p for multisig). The pool reads the older legacy form, starting 1 (or 3). They are two ways of writing the same address: the same wallet, the same coins.

Paste your address into the converter on the home page and it gives you the exact username to use. Electron Cash can also switch its display to legacy addresses in its preferences. Then add a dot and a rig name, so the username reads 1YOURLEGACYADDRESS.rig1.

3. Point your miner at the pool

Open your miner's web interface, find the pool settings, and enter the URL, worker and password from the table above. Add a different rig name after the dot for each machine, such as .rig1, .rig2, so you can tell them apart on your stats page. Every rig can use the same address.

• Antminer (Bitmain): Miner Configuration → Pool 1. Paste the URL, set Worker to ADDRESS.rig1 and Password to x, then Save & Apply.
• Whatsminer (MicroBT): Configuration → Pools (or WhatsMinerTool). Same three fields, then save and restart.
• Bitaxe and other AxeOS miners: Settings. Stratum URL is stratum.bch.segpool.com with no prefix, Stratum Port is 3334, Stratum User is ADDRESS.rig1, Password x. Save and restart.
• Braiins OS, Avalon and others: the same three values go into the pool fields; the menu names vary.

Leave your other pools as backups if you like. The pool sets each rig's share difficulty on its own within minutes, from a Bitaxe to a rack of S21s.

4. Check that it works

Open the wallet watcher and enter your address in either form. Within a few minutes you should see your rigs and your shares, sorted by how close they came to a block. The hashrate figure averages at least ten minutes, so it reads low until a rig has been connected that long, and short readings wobble because shares arrive at random: judge your rig on the hourly or daily figure.

5. Know what to expect

Solo mining pays in whole blocks. At the current difficulty, a block takes D × 2³² ÷ your hashrate seconds on average, and luck spreads the real wait widely around that: about 63% of blocks come within the average time and about one in seven take more than twice as long. Use the BCH mining calculator for your rig's expected earnings, power cost and odds.

Bitcoin Cash adjusts its difficulty after every block (the ASERT rule, with a two-day half-life), so a swing in network hashrate shows up in difficulty within hours rather than weeks. When a block is found, its reward can be spent after 100 more blocks, about 17 hours. Rarely, another miner's block at the same height wins and yours is orphaned, which pays nothing.

Troubleshooting

• No shares at all: check the URL and port 3334, and that your network allows outbound connections on that port. AxeOS miners want the host without stratum+tcp://.
• Rejected, or no stats for your address: make sure the username starts with the legacy address (1… or 3…), not bitcoincash:q…, and that the dot comes before the rig name. The converter builds it for you.
• Hashrate lower than the miner says: compare over an hour, not ten minutes. Persistent gaps usually mean stale or rejected shares from a slow connection.
• Still stuck: email asil@segments.ae. Real people run this pool.

Questions

Why does the pool want a legacy address?

The pool software reads legacy base58 addresses (1… or 3…). CashAddr (bitcoincash:q…) is a newer way of writing the same address, so converting it changes nothing about where the reward goes. Token-aware addresses (bitcoincash:z…, r…) convert too.

What hardware can mine BCH?

Any SHA-256 ASIC that can mine Bitcoin, from a Bitaxe to an Antminer or Whatsminer. GPUs and CPUs are far too slow to matter.

Why solo instead of a pay-per-share pool?

Solo keeps 99% of each block instead of paying a pool's insurance premium, at the cost of lumpy income: a month can bring several blocks or none. The calculator shows the odds for your hashrate.