Lone Bitcoin miner wins block using tiny, cheap rig — ‘1 in a million chance’

A solo Bitcoin miner using a relatively cheap, pocket-sized crypto mining rig has solved one of the blockchain’s blocks and earned the full $263,000 reward.

The miner became the 297th solo miner to mine a Bitcoin block from the solo.ckpool Bitcoin (BTC) mining pool, its developer, Con Kolivas, said in a March 10 X post.

He added the miner used a 480-gigahash per second (GH/s) Bitaxe machine. For comparison, many big crypto-mining companies use machines that can operate at over 230,000 GH/s.

“A miner of this size has only less than a 1 in a million chance of finding a block per day, or put alternatively, would take 3,500 years to find a block on average,” Kolivas added.

The miner snared a total of 3.15 BTC for solving block 887,212, which was timestamped on March 10 at 7:22 pm UTC. That bounty includes the current 3.125 Bitcoin mining reward and another 0.025 Bitcoin from transaction fees, mempool.space data shows.

A 1,200 gigahash Bitaxe Gamma 601 machine, which is nearly three times more powerful than the one used by the solo miner, is priced at around $158, according to Bitcoin miner marketplace ASIC Miner Value.

ASIC Miner Value estimates that the Bitaxe Gamma 601 will make just over $20 a year while using around $18 worth of electricity, coming out to a yearly net profit of under $3.

It also states the odds of the Bitaxe Gamma 601 mining a solo block on any given day is one in 4.6 million, or one in 12,700 over a year.

Related: Solo miner snags Bitcoin block reward worth $300K

Solo Bitcoin miners rarely solve blocks, let alone those with tiny mining rigs.

Most Bitcoin is mined from the larger pools such as Foundry USA — which obtains a large share of its hashrate from public Bitcoin miners like Cipher Mining, Bitfarms and Hut 8.

The largest public Bitcoin mining firm by market cap and hashrate, MARA Holdings, uses its own Bitcoin mining pool, MARA Pool.

While pocket-sized Bitcoin miners are hardly profitable, some of these micro miners are being built in an open-source manner to fight the “secrecy and exclusivity” of the Bitcoin mining industry, one of the builders of Bitaxe miners, “Skot,” told Cointelegraph in a September 2023 interview.

Most Bitcoin miners, such as those made by Bitmai,n are closed-sourced, which runs contrary to Bitcoin’s ethos, Skot said.

“The advent of these open-source projects serves to shed light on this often opaque area, making it more transparent and accessible to the public.”

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