How to Mine BitcoinII (BC2)

Connect any SHA-256 ASIC — from a Bitaxe to a multi-PH farm — and mine BC2 with instant, trustless coinbase payouts. Five minutes from wallet to first share.

Published 2026-07-28 · Updated 2026-07-28 · Written by the CapsPool operator (BC2 Community Lead)

BitcoinII (BC2) is a proof-of-work Bitcoin sister chain: the same SHA-256d algorithm, 21M supply, ~10-minute blocks, and four-year halvings, launched on a clean genesis with no premine. Because it shares Bitcoin's mining algorithm, every Bitcoin ASIC ever made can mine BC2 with zero modification — and because network difficulty is a tiny fraction of Bitcoin's, small hardware that could never realistically find a Bitcoin block has genuine solo odds here. The current block reward is 50 BC2 plus transaction fees.

What hardware can mine BC2?

Any SHA-256 ASIC: Bitmain Antminer (S9 through S21), Whatsminer, Canaan Avalon (including the Avalon Nano home miners), Bitaxe, NerdAxe, Lucky Miner, and every other Stratum-compatible SHA-256 device. GPUs and CPUs cannot mine BC2 — SHA-256 difficulty left them behind years ago. You can also mine without owning hardware at all by renting hashrate on NiceHash, MiningRigRentals, or Braiins Hashpower Market and pointing it at the pool (see renting hashrate below).

Step 1 — Create a BC2 wallet

You need a BC2 address to mine to. The recommended route is the official BitcoinII-Core wallet:

1. Download the release for your OS from the official GitHub releases page and install it.
2. Let the node synchronize with the BC2 network (it's a small chain — sync is fast compared to Bitcoin).
3. Create a receiving address. Choose the Bech32 format — it starts with bc1q and has built-in typo protection.
4. Back up your wallet file and store the backup offline.

You can also mine to an exchange deposit address, but for solo mining we strongly recommend a wallet you control — block rewards land directly in the coinbase transaction, and exchanges occasionally rotate deposit addresses without warning.

Step 2 — Choose Solo or PPS

Solo: you are mining for whole blocks. Find one and the entire reward — 50 BC2 plus fees, minus the 1% pool fee — is paid directly to your address inside the block itself. The pool never touches your coins; there is no balance, no withdrawal, no counterparty risk. The tradeoff is variance: you might hit a block your first day or wait months.

PPS (Pay Per Share): guaranteed income. The pool pays you a fixed rate for every share you submit, hourly, from its published on-chain bankroll (minimum payout 0.01 BC2) — whether or not the pool finds blocks. The pool absorbs all the variance; the 1% fee is effectively your insurance premium. You can verify the PPS bankroll on-chain at any time.

Same fee either way. Gamblers go Solo, steady-income miners go PPS, and plenty of people split their fleet.

Step 3 — Connect your miner

Username is your BC2 address, optionally with a rig name appended: bc1qyouraddress.myrig. Password is x. Pick the port that matches your hardware class:

Servers: US (primary, Ashburn VA) and EU (Helsinki) run identical ports — connect to whichever is closer and use the other as failover. Always enter the full stratum URL:

Marketplace/rental ports follow the same pattern: stratum+tcp://stratum.capspool.io:3334 (solo) and :3336 (PPS), or the eu.capspool.io equivalents.

Configuring a standard ASIC (Antminer example)

1. Open your ASIC's web control panel and go to Miner Configuration.
2. Pool URL: stratum+tcp://stratum.capspool.io:3333 (or :3335 for PPS).
3. Worker: bc1qyouraddress.S21 — your BC2 address, dot, any rig name (letters and numbers).
4. Password: x
5. Optionally fill the second and third pool profiles with the EU server (eu.capspool.io, same port) as automatic failover.
6. Save, apply, and let the machine restart. Shares typically start flowing within a minute or two.

Configuring a Bitaxe

1. Open the AxeOS web interface and go to Settings.
2. Stratum host: stratum.capspool.io · Stratum port: 3337 (solo) or 3338 (PPS).
3. Stratum user: bc1qyouraddress.myaxe · Password: x
4. Save and restart. Port 3337/3338 starts at difficulty 512 and auto-adjusts down to 64 — tuned so Bitaxe-class hardware submits shares at a healthy cadence.

How difficulty works here

Every port runs automatic difficulty (vardiff). Your first shares arrive at the port's start difficulty; within seconds the pool measures your real hashrate and settles you at a personal optimum of roughly one share every few seconds. There is nothing to configure for normal use.

Manual control (optional): set your password to d=NUMBER to pin a starting/minimum difficulty — for example d=500000. The standard mining.suggest_difficulty extension is honored too. This works on every port.

Renting hashrate to mine BC2

• NiceHash: point your order at port 3334 (Solo) or 3336 (PPS). These ports natively satisfy NiceHash's minimum-difficulty validation — no password tricks needed.
• Braiins Hashpower Market: same ports, works out of the box.
• MiningRigRentals: MRR rents individual machines, usually under 1 PH/s — use the standard ASIC port 3333/3335 for a single-machine rental. For multi-PH MRR orders use 3334/3336. If MRR shows low or zero hashrate, set the rental's pool password to d=65536.
• Large bursts (100 PH+) are fine: the rental ports retarget difficulty within about a second of your first shares.

What are my solo odds? (Honest math)

Expected time to find a block is difficulty × 2³² ÷ your hashrate — equivalently, your slice of network hashrate applied to BC2's ~144 blocks per day. Because BC2's network hashrate is a tiny fraction of Bitcoin's, hardware that would statistically never find a Bitcoin block has real odds here: this pool's block history includes finds by single ASICs and even Bitaxe-class miners. Check current network difficulty on the dashboard or the community explorer at bc2mempool.com, plug in your hashrate, and you have your expected interval. Remember it's an average — variance cuts both ways, which is why the PPS pool exists for anyone who wants the same infrastructure without the gamble.

Monitoring your miner

No account needed. Open capspool.io, go to My Stats, and enter your BC2 address — you'll see per-worker hashrate, share counts, best shares, and (for solo) every block you've found. The URL is bookmarkable, so you can save your personal dashboard. All of it is also available as JSON through the public API if you run your own monitoring.

Payouts

Solo: instant and trustless. Your address is in the coinbase of the block you found; the reward is spendable as soon as the block matures (100 confirmations, standard Bitcoin-family rule). There is nothing to claim and no minimum — and you can verify the coinbase payout yourself on the BC2 block explorer.

PPS: paid hourly to your mining address, 0.01 BC2 minimum, from the pool's published bankroll. Every bankroll address is public — verify the balance on-chain whenever you like.

Troubleshooting

• "Pool difficulty too low" on NiceHash: you're on the wrong port — use 3334/3336.
• Authorization rejected: almost always the address. Check for uppercase characters in a bc1q address (bech32 is lowercase-only), a missing character, or a wrong-coin address. The pool validates every address against a full BC2 node before accepting shares.
• Rental shows low or spiky hashrate: difficulty too high for the machine size. Move a single-machine rental to 3333/3335, or set password d=65536.
• Tiny miner shows very rare shares: anything under ~50 GH/s sits below the small-port difficulty floor of 64 — shares will naturally be sparse. They still count.

Why mine BC2 on CapsPool?

CapsPool is run by the BC2 Community Lead as independent infrastructure for the network — not a coin-of-the-week farm. Solo blocks pay out in the coinbase itself, so the pool literally cannot hold or lose your reward. Fees are a flat 1%, all pool addresses are published for on-chain verification, statistics are honest to a fault (we label lottery blocks and estimated figures explicitly rather than printing pretty numbers), and US + EU servers are independent full deployments, not proxies. Questions? The operator answers them personally on Discord.