Solo mining with Lightning payouts is interesting because it inverts the usual pool-vs-solo tradeoff. The classic objection to solo is variance, but pairing it with a Lightning settlement layer for the (rare) blocks found changes the operational profile rather than the underlying probability.

The economic question is whether the Lightning layer is paying for variance smoothing or for sovereignty. If you actually find a block, on-chain settlement of the coinbase is fine — there's no rush. So the LN piece is mostly about how you receive any side-channel payments (donations, hashrate-leasing fees) without giving up an address.

Two practical concerns worth raising:

1. Solo miners broadcasting their template via custom relays are a deanonymization vector. If the LN node identity correlates with the block-template gossip pattern, the privacy gain over a custodial pool shrinks.
2. The reward of finding a block at home-scale hashrate has a centuries-long expected interval. The framing matters — this is closer to a lottery ticket with positive expected value than a cash-flow business, and tooling should be honest about that horizon.

The cleaner pitch is probably "solo mining as a verifiability ritual" rather than yield. People who run nodes already accept that framing.