Bitaxe mining with Tor
and hourly Ark payouts.

1. Prepare your miner, gateway and Ark wallet

You need a Bitaxe or compatible SHA-256 Bitcoin ASIC, a Linux home host with Docker for the gateway, and a compatible mainnet Ark wallet. Your Bitaxe does the hashing; the gateway forwards mining traffic and does not mine itself.

Choose a wallet from Second's wallets built with Bark. Copy the full Ark receive address, not a combined payment link. ArkPool uses Second's mainnet Ark server and checks address compatibility when you connect. An ark1 prefix alone is not a guarantee of compatibility.

Keep your recovery phrase, wallet backups and private keys private. The gateway does not need them. Reuse your mining address when reconnecting: a different address creates a separate pool account without moving your previous balance.

2. Connect your Bitaxe through the Tor gateway

Follow the current ArkPool Gateway Docker setup instructions. Review its security notes and release guidance; the older alpha.1 bundle lacks newer documented hardening.

Set LAN_IP to your gateway host's local address. Leave the prefilled POOL_ONION and POOL_PORT unchanged. Once the gateway is healthy, use these settings in your miner:

Pool host

Your gateway's LAN address

Port

3333

Username

Your full compatible mainnet Ark address

Password

x

Stratum TLS

Off on your trusted LAN only

The public website arkpool.org is not a Stratum endpoint. The gateway carries the remote connection over Tor. Keep it LAN-only: no router port forwarding, public listener or direct clearnet fallback. Save your existing miner settings before switching.

Private by design. Two Tor paths for resilience.

Your Bitaxe needs only a local pool connection. ArkPool Gateway handles Tor in Docker, keeping the remote mining connection separate from your miner and reducing exposure of your home's public IP to the pool.

Two ready paths

Separate Tor clients maintain their own state. New connections alternate between ready clients; failed connection attempts can try the other ready path.

Automatic recovery

Health watchdogs recover unhealthy Tor clients. Failed paths cool down before retrying, while healthy mining sessions stay on their chosen path.

No silent downgrade

If Tor is unavailable, the gateway waits rather than switching to a direct clearnet connection. No inbound router port forwarding is needed.

Keys stay yours

The gateway forwards mining work, not wallet secrets. Your Ark receive address is enough; it does not need your recovery phrase or private keys.

Redundancy is not zero downtime: an active-path failure requires the miner to reconnect. Both Tor clients share your host and internet connection, so they cannot cover a home power failure, ISP outage, pool outage or Ark service interruption. Tor is not a guarantee of anonymity; the pool still associates your shares with your Ark address.

The settings above use plaintext Stratum only on your trusted LAN. Compatible firmware can instead use the gateway's optional verified LAN TLS on port 3334. Follow the current gateway documentation for pairing and upgrades; keep certificate verification on and unencrypted fallback off when requiring TLS.

3. Understand the 1-sat minimum and hourly payouts

ArkPool buys eligible verified shares; you do not need to find an entire Bitcoin block yourself. Eligible whole-sat balances settle on UTC-hour boundaries, with a minimum payout of 1 sat. Smaller fractions remain in your balance until payable. Timing can vary during an alpha service outage or payment-provider disruption.

This is not a fixed income offer or a guarantee of a payment every hour. Rewards depend on verified work and the terms applying to that work. The pool is operator-managed, not trustless.

Ark payouts are not Lightning payouts

Both are Bitcoin payment systems, but they are different. ArkPool sends miners sats over Ark using Bark from Second. Do not use a Lightning address, Lightning invoice, on-chain Bitcoin address or Signet test address as your ArkPool username.

4. Check hashrate, shares and confirmed payments

The public mining dashboard shows aggregate pool activity. Its hashrate is estimated from verified work, so it can differ from your Bitaxe's own reading. Figures have measurement timestamps and normally refresh every five minutes.

Use the Tor-only miner dashboard linked on our homepage for your own pending balance and payment history. Anyone who knows an address can view its public read-only miner information. Accepted shares are not proof that a payment arrived; check confirmed payments and your receiving wallet.

Tor transport does not make the operator trustless or guarantee anonymity. The public website is delivered by Cloudflare; individual miner lookups stay on the separate Tor dashboard. See our privacy boundaries.

Ask your AI agent to help with setup

Share our ArkPool miner setup skill with your agent. It explains the supported workflow, current documentation, safe settings and verification checks. Reading a skill does not install software or authorize changes.

Read https://arkpool.org/SKILL.md and help me plan my Bitaxe setup. Inspect first, keep my wallet keys private, and ask before switching my existing miner.

Use with Hermes Agent or OpenClaw

The same portable skill works with either agent's documented Markdown skill format. It needs no wallet credentials or platform-specific plugin. Review the file before installing, keep your agent's approval protections enabled, and start with a read-only plan.

Hermes Agent: on versions supporting direct-URL skill installation, run hermes skills install https://arkpool.org/SKILL.md. Review any scanner findings; do not bypass them. See the Hermes skills documentation.

OpenClaw: save the reviewed file as skills/arkpool-miner-setup/SKILL.md inside your active agent workspace. Preserve an existing copy rather than overwriting it blindly. Start a new session and ask the agent to use arkpool-miner-setup. See the OpenClaw skills documentation for skill discovery and allowlists.

If your runtime cannot reach the home gateway, the skill produces a home-side handoff. It does not grant remote access, install itself, or authorize changes to mining or payouts. Compatibility is based on the documented skill format; live agent installations have not been tested here.

For machine-readable discovery, use llms.txt and the read-only public statistics API. No wallet keys or miner addresses belong in that API.