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

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A solo Bitcoin miner utilizing a comparatively low cost, pocket-sized crypto mining rig has solved one of many blockchain’s blocks and earned the complete $263,000 reward.

The miner grew to become 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 publish.

He added the miner used a 480-gigahash per second (GH/s) Bitaxe machine. For comparability, many large crypto-mining firms use machines that may function at over 230,000 GH/s.

“A miner of this measurement has solely lower than a 1 in 1,000,000 likelihood of discovering a block per day, or put alternatively, would take 3,500 years to discover a block on common,” Kolivas added.

The miner snared a complete of three.15 BTC for fixing block 887,212, which was timestamped on March 10 at 7:22 pm UTC. That bounty consists of the current 3.125 Bitcoin mining reward and one other 0.025 Bitcoin from transaction charges, mempool.area knowledge shows.

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Supply: Con Kolivas

A 1,200 gigahash Bitaxe Gamma 601 machine, which is almost 3 times extra highly effective than the one utilized by the solo miner, is priced at round $158, according to Bitcoin miner market ASIC Miner Worth.

ASIC Miner Worth estimates that the Bitaxe Gamma 601 will make simply over $20 a 12 months whereas utilizing round $18 price of electrical energy, popping out to a yearly internet revenue of below $3.

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The Bitaxe Gamma 601 is roughly the dimensions of a smartphone. Supply: ASIC Miner Value

It additionally states the percentages 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 12 months.

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

Solo Bitcoin miners not often resolve blocks, not to mention these with tiny mining rigs.

Most Bitcoin is mined from the bigger swimming pools comparable to Foundry USA — which obtains a big share of its hashrate from public Bitcoin miners like Cipher Mining, Bitfarms and Hut 8.

The most important public Bitcoin mining agency by market cap and hashrate, MARA Holdings, makes use of its personal Bitcoin mining pool, MARA Pool.

Whereas pocket-sized Bitcoin miners are hardly worthwhile, a few of these micro miners are being in-built an open-source manner to struggle the “secrecy and exclusivity” of the Bitcoin mining trade, one of many builders of Bitaxe miners, “Skot,” advised Cointelegraph in a September 2023 interview.

Most Bitcoin miners, comparable to these made by Bitmai,n are closed-sourced, which runs opposite to Bitcoin’s ethos, Skot stated.

“The arrival of those open-source initiatives serves to make clear this usually opaque space, making it extra clear and accessible to the general public.”

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