Frequently Asked Questions
Straight answers from the people who run the pool. BitcoinII (BC2) and CapStash (CAP) mining, payouts, and the statistics you see on our dashboard.
How do I solo mine BitcoinII (BC2)?
Point any SHA-256 ASIC at stratum+tcp://stratum.capspool.io:3333 with your BC2 wallet address as the username and x as the password. If you find a block, the full reward (50 BC2 plus transaction fees, minus the 1% pool fee) is paid straight to your address in the block's coinbase — no registration, no withdrawal step. Bitaxe and other small miners should use port 3337 instead, and EU miners can connect to eu.capspool.io on the same ports. Full walkthrough: How to Mine BitcoinII (BC2).
How do I mine CapStash (CAP)?
CapStash uses the Whirlpool-512 proof-of-work algorithm and is mined with GPUs, not SHA-256 ASICs. Run a Whirlpool miner such as DankMiner (v1.2.9 or newer — latest release recommended) or Barracuda, and connect to stratum+tcp://caps.capspool.io:7333 for solo mining or stratum+tcp://caps.capspool.io:8333 for PPLNS, using your CAP address as the username. Blocks arrive every 60 seconds with a 1 CAP reward. Full walkthrough including Windows, Linux, and HiveOS setup: How to Mine CapStash (CAP).
What is the difference between Solo, PPLNS, and PPS?
Solo means you only get paid when your own hardware finds a block — you keep the whole reward, but payouts are rare and random. PPLNS (Pay Per Last N Shares) splits each block the pool finds among recent contributors in proportion to their shares, smoothing income but still depending on pool luck. PPS (Pay Per Share) pays a fixed rate for every share you submit regardless of whether blocks are found — the pool absorbs the variance from its own bankroll, which is why PPS carries the same 1% fee described as an insurance premium. CapsPool runs Solo and PPS for BC2, and Solo and PPLNS for CAP.
What are CapsPool's fees?
All pools charge 1%: BitcoinII Solo, BitcoinII PPS, CapStash Native Solo, and CapStash Native PPLNS. There are no hidden fees, no withdrawal fees, and no registration. Every pool address is published — you can verify balances on-chain at any time via the bankroll address list.
When and how do I get paid?
Solo payouts on both coins are instant and trustless: your address is written into the block's coinbase transaction, so the reward is yours the moment the block matures — the pool never holds your coins. BitcoinII PPS pays hourly from the pool's published bankroll with a 0.01 BC2 minimum. CapStash PPLNS pays out after a found block reaches 100 confirmations, with a 0.001 CAP minimum, split across the last 10,000 shares.
Should I connect to the US or EU server?
Pick whichever is geographically closer — lower latency means marginally fewer stale shares. The US server (Ashburn, Virginia) is the primary at stratum.capspool.io; the EU server (Helsinki, Finland) runs identical, independent pool instances at eu.capspool.io on the same ports. Both regions mine the same chains and your address works identically on either.
Why does a block say "Lottery" instead of an effort percentage?
On CapStash, the network difficulty periodically drops to 1 by design — an anti-concentration mechanism in the chain itself. When that happens, the next block is found almost instantly by whoever submits first, like a lottery ticket rather than a grind. Roughly 6–7% of CAP blocks are lottery blocks. An "effort" percentage compares work done against difficulty, and against a difficulty of 1 that number is meaningless — so we label those blocks honestly as Lottery instead of showing a misleading ~1% figure.
What does the ~ before an effort percentage mean?
A tilde marks an estimated effort. Some miners run proxies that filter shares and only submit block solutions, which makes their reported hashrate — and therefore raw effort numbers — massively understated. When our detection identifies such a miner, we estimate their true hashrate from the blocks they actually find (blocks are unfakeable proof of work at full network difficulty) and compute effort from that instead. Estimated values are always marked with ~ and only applied within the current measurement window; every other block shows the raw number.
Why is the pool hashrate higher than the sum of the visible workers?
Same cause as estimated effort: a share-filtering miner's reported hashrate can be 10x or more below reality, but the blocks they find prove the real number. The pool headline hashrate uses block-implied estimation for detected filterers — the same method Bitcoin Core's getnetworkhashps uses to measure the whole network — while each worker's own page continues to show exactly what that worker reports. Nothing is hidden: the API exposes a hashrate_method field telling you which method produced each figure.
Why does my Bitaxe submit shares in ~61-second bursts?
That cadence comes from the Bitaxe firmware's work-handling cycle, not from the pool. The device periodically refreshes its job state on a roughly 61-second rhythm, which shows up as slightly clustered share timing on low-difficulty ports. It is cosmetic: shares are accepted normally, your hashrate averages out correctly over minutes, and no earnings are affected. Use port 3337 (solo) or 3338 (PPS), which are tuned for Bitaxe-class hardware with a low starting difficulty.
Why isn't my address found on the stats lookup page?
The most common cause is letter case. Bech32 addresses — BC2 addresses starting with bc1 and CAP addresses starting with cap1 — are defined as lowercase; if your miner or a copy-paste introduced uppercase characters, the lookup (and the pool's address validation) will not match. Enter the address in all lowercase, exactly as your wallet displays it. Also make sure you're looking it up on the pool where you actually mine — stats are tracked per pool.
Can I mine on CapsPool with HiveOS?
Yes. For CapStash, DankMiner installs as a HiveOS custom miner straight from a flight sheet — set the miner name to dankminer, the hash algorithm to whirlpool, and the pool URL to stratum+tcp://caps.capspool.io:8333 (or :7333 for solo). The exact field-by-field flight sheet configuration is in the CapStash mining guide; it's the same setup the operator runs on a 20+ rig fleet. BitcoinII is ASIC-mined, so HiveOS applies there only if you manage ASICs through it — the stratum details are identical either way.
How long does it take to find a block solo?
Expected time is difficulty × 2³² ÷ your hashrate, which works out to your share of the network: if you contribute 1% of network hashrate, you find on average 1% of its blocks. On CapStash that math is friendly — 1,440 blocks per day plus lottery rounds means even single-GPU miners land blocks regularly. On BitcoinII, with ~144 blocks per day at 50 BC2 each, a modern ASIC's expected time depends heavily on current network hashrate — check the live difficulty on the dashboard. Either way, "expected" is an average: solo variance means real gaps can be much shorter or much longer, which is exactly the gamble solo miners sign up for. PPS and PPLNS exist for everyone who'd rather not ride that curve.
Which GPUs work for CapStash, and what hashrate should I expect?
NVIDIA GTX 1060 through RTX 5090 (driver 525+), AMD RX 470 and newer via OpenCL, and Intel Arc experimentally — hybrid rigs work in a single miner instance. Whirlpool-512 is core-bound, so raise core clock and drop memory clock for the best hashrate-per-watt; exact numbers vary by card and tune, and your miner's console plus our dashboard will both show your real rate within minutes. Native-difficulty reporting on this pool means the number you see is the number your card actually does — no 2x distortion from Bitcoin-derived constants.