I've been a little confused by the idea of a "solo mining pool." What is the advantage to a solo miner for using something like blitzpool as opposed to just mining on their own?

Fair question.

True solo means running your own bitcoind + stratum server 24/7 at home. Most sovereign setup, full privacy — but not everyone has a node, stable uptime, or an ISP that plays along. A lot of people just have a Bitaxe on the shelf.

A solo pool handles that plumbing for you (node, stratum, dashboard, stats), but you still get 100% of the block reward to your own address if you find a block. That's the difference from a regular pool, where rewards get split PPS/PPLNS-style.

Tradeoff: the pool sees your worker and payout address. With SV2 this shrinks — if you run a node at home, you can use SV2-UI locally to build your own templates and just use Blitzpool as transport. Pool connectivity, but you decide what's in the block.

TL;DR: solo at home is the purest path. A solo pool is for everyone who wants the 100% block reward shot without running the infrastructure.