Satoshi Solo
Mining Co.

Before the Bitcoin ASICs, before the solar panels, before the Linux machine and the Kaspa GPU rig — there was a Bobcat 300 Helium miner sitting in a utility room in Reno, Nevada, quietly earning HNT and planting the seed for everything that followed. That little box, nicknamed Jumpy Concrete Hippo by the Helium network's random name generator, was the first mining device this operation ever ran. And it actually made money.

The setup was done right from the start. A high-gain aftermarket antenna was mounted on the chimney — on high ground in Reno, with the nearest competing hotspot miles away. Under 10 feet of LMR400 low-loss coax ran from the chimney down into the utility room where the Bobcat lived. For a while, it was genuinely profitable. HNT was worth real money, the coverage map around the house was essentially empty, and a small box on a shelf was generating passive income. It was the moment the mining philosophy clicked: deploy the right hardware, in the right location, point it at the right network, and let it work.

Then the Helium network changed. The token migrated to Solana, rewards shifted to IOT tokens worth fractions of a cent, and Bobcat as a company quietly ceased operations — no more firmware updates, no more support. Jumpy Concrete Hippo still shows up in the app but earns almost nothing. It is, for all practical purposes, retired. But it did its job. It proved that home mining was real, that the right setup mattered, and that the instinct to pursue it was worth following. Everything that came after — the NerdOCTAXE miners, the Avalon Q, the solar array, the whole Satoshi Solo Mining Company — traces its roots back to that Bobcat on the chimney.

After a frustrating wait — two orders that didn't ship on time — the Nerd Q (Avalon Q) finally arrived from Solo Satoshi in Houston. At ~90 TH/s it dwarfs everything else in the fleet combined. Getting it configured on Braiins Pool and eventually moving it to the garage to run on solar power is the next mission. The fleet is starting to feel real.

Update: A tip from The Hobbyist Miner led to a useful discovery — Crypto Cloak sells a 3D printed exhaust shroud designed specifically for the back of the Avalon Q. It connects to standard ducting to route the hot exhaust air directly out of the garage rather than just dumping heat into the space. At $25 plus $10 shipping, it's a cheap experiment. The shroud is on order and due to arrive this week. If it works as hoped, it could meaningfully reduce garage ambient temps — which matters for every miner in the space.

Eight Renogy 200W ShadowFlux panels are now installed — four at 35° tilt on a proper rack, four flat on the roof at 19° while the second rack arrives. The EcoFlow Delta Pro 3 is receiving charge from both arrays. Sorting out the MPPT Y-connector conflict between the two arrays is the current project. The goal: power the Avalon Q entirely from the sun.

Both Nerd1 and Nerd2 are NerdOCTAXE-γ units — same model, very different performance. Nerd1 from Power Mining runs at 675MHz, 11 TH/s, 54°C. Nerd2 from ASIC Marketplace is capped at 600MHz, runs at 62°C with fans at 100%, and came without the rear fan and enclosure wrap. Lesson learned: the vendor matters. Power Mining earned a strong recommendation from this operation.

The Dell XPS 8900 had been sitting in a closet collecting dust — an Intel i7-6700 machine with a GTX 960 2GB that was too old to be anyone's primary computer but too good to throw away. The GTX 960 was pulling 88W and producing a measly ~18 MH/s on Kaspa. The plan: install Ubuntu 24.04, drop in a used RTX 3060 12GB, and turn it into a dedicated Kaspa mining and local AI inference box.

The ASUS Dual RTX 3060 12GB OC White arrived from eBay for $315. After swapping the card, updating the Nvidia drivers, and configuring BzMiner v24.0.1 with a systemd auto-start service, the numbers told the story: ~396 MH/s at 138W, GPU sitting at a comfortable 70°C. That's a 22x hashrate improvement over the old card. The closet computer is now a contributing member of the fleet — running Kaspa to HeroMiners 24/7 and ready for local AI workloads when needed.

It started simply enough — the Dell XPS 8900 had been sitting in a closet and nobody could remember the Windows login password. What followed was a crash course in everything that can go wrong before something goes right. The Windows profile turned out to be corrupted beyond repair. After exhausting every recovery option, the decision was made: don't fix Windows. Ditch it entirely.

The plan was Ubuntu 24.04 LTS — free, stable, better suited for 24/7 mining, no forced reboots at 3am. A bootable USB was created using Balena Etcher on the HP Omen, flashing the Ubuntu ISO onto a thumb drive. First hurdle: Secure Boot was enabled on the XPS, preventing the machine from booting from the USB at all. Into the BIOS we went, Secure Boot disabled, and suddenly Ubuntu was loading.

The installer presented another surprise — it defaulted to a 4TB secondary storage drive instead of the 1TB system drive. Caught just in time. With the right drive selected, Ubuntu installed cleanly. Nvidia drivers went in with a single command. BzMiner was configured, a systemd service was set up for auto-start on boot, and the XPS was suddenly a real Linux machine doing real work. For anyone who has never made the jump from Windows to Linux — it is not always smooth, but it is absolutely worth it.

Here's something nobody tells you about home mining: your expensive router doesn't matter if your miner's WiFi antenna is terrible. Nerd1 and Nerd2 — both NerdOCTAXE-γ units — started showing erratic behavior. Nerd2 was cycling on and off. Nerd1 was throwing watchdog resets every few days, quietly bleeding away hashrate. The culprit turned out to be weak WiFi signal — Nerd1 at -90 dBm, Nerd2 at -83 dBm — despite sitting just 25 feet from a Netgear RS700 on a 2 Gbps Spectrum fiber connection — one of the best consumer networking setups money can buy — with only a single drywall wall in between.

The frustrating part: Nerd3 (the Bitaxe Gamma) sitting in the exact same location was pulling -53 dBm without any issues. The problem wasn't the router or the distance — it was the ESP32 WiFi chip inside the NerdOCTAXE-γ itself. It's a tiny chip antenna on a mining board, not engineered for range. Changing the router's WiFi channel helped slightly. Rotating the miners helped slightly. But -83 dBm was still poor, and the watchdog resets kept coming.

The fix: a Netgear EAX16 WiFi 6 extender placed three feet from the miners. Simple enough in theory. In practice, a new problem emerged — both miners kept stubbornly reconnecting to the main router across the house because the extender was broadcasting the same SSID as the main router. They couldn't tell the difference. The solution was giving the extender its own dedicated network name and manually pointing each miner to it. Once the miners were locked onto the extender three feet away, Nerd1 jumped from -78 dBm to -36 dBm. That's the difference between a miner that reboots randomly and one that runs for weeks without interruption. Nerd2 put up more of a fight — it dropped into hotspot mode during the SSID change, forcing a phone reconnect and manual reconfiguration through its own broadcast network. But it eventually came around. Lesson learned: with WiFi-only miners, the signal quality at the device is everything. Spend the $79 on the extender before you spend hours troubleshooting phantom reboots.

The HP Omen 45L with its RTX 5090 sits at the center of the operation — it's the trading terminal in the morning, the AI inference engine for investigative work during the day, and theoretically an idle GPU compute powerhouse the rest of the time. The question was: could we monetize those idle hours? Enter Salad — a background app that lets you earn by contributing your GPU to various rendering and compute jobs. It sounded perfect. It was not perfect.

The RTX 5090 is one of the most powerful consumer GPUs on the planet. On Salad, it was "chopping" — their word, not ours — at somewhere between $0.04 and $0.20 per hour. At Nevada's electricity rate of roughly $0.12/kWh, and with the 5090 drawing up to 575W, the margins were essentially zero or negative. We ran into degraded status warnings, Windows Smart App Control blocking Salad's components, power limit conflicts, and the constant interruption of the app throttling itself every time the machine was actually being used for real work. After days of troubleshooting for returns that barely covered the electricity bill, the verdict was in: Salad is a fine platform for a dedicated idle rig. It is not the right tool for a primary workstation that has more important things to do.

The search for a better answer led to Vast.ai and RunPod — peer-to-peer GPU compute marketplaces where an RTX 5090 with a 2 Gbps connection could potentially earn $200–$240/month net after electricity. The catch: Vast.ai requires Linux, which conflicts with the Omen's role as a daily Windows machine for trading and investigations. The hunt continues. The goal is finding a solution that lets the 5090 earn its keep during idle hours without disrupting the primary workflows that depend on it. When we crack that, it goes in the journal.

After the Dell XPS 8900's transformation into a Linux mining machine, reality set in: Kaspa GPU mining with an RTX 3060 12GB, while impressive on paper, just wasn't worth the electricity bill in Nevada. The numbers didn't lie — GPU mining in 2026 is a tough game unless you have near-free power. So the decision was made to pivot the XPS to something more potentially lucrative: becoming a Vast.ai GPU compute host.

Vast.ai is a peer-to-peer GPU marketplace where individuals rent out their hardware to AI researchers, developers, and companies that need compute on demand. An RTX 3060 12GB on a 2 Gbps connection is a genuinely attractive offering on the platform. The setup process involves installing Docker, the NVIDIA Container Toolkit, and the Vast.ai host daemon — then forwarding ports on the RS700 and linking the machine to a Vast.ai account. The Kaspa mining config has been cleared and the GPU is standing by. The migration is currently underway. Stay tuned.

One of the most meaningful steps in building a sovereign Bitcoin operation is running your own full node. Rather than trusting a third party to validate your transactions and relay block data, a full node does it yourself — downloading and verifying the entire Bitcoin blockchain independently. The Satoshi Solo Mining Company runs an Umbrel node on the local network, fully synced and serving the local network around the clock.

Umbrel is an open source home server platform that makes running a Bitcoin node surprisingly approachable. Once the blockchain sync completed — which took several days — the Public Pool app was installed directly on Umbrel. Public Pool acts as a local stratum proxy, accepting connections from ASIC miners on the home network and routing their work directly through the node. Nerd2 (the second NerdOCTAXE-γ) is pointed at the Umbrel node on port 2018, meaning it solo mines Bitcoin through a completely sovereign local infrastructure. No third-party pool. No external dependency. Just the miner, the node, and the blockchain. That's about as close to Satoshi's original vision as a home miner can get.