With a 1 in 1.1 billion chance, a micro-miner can mine a Bitcoin block worth more than $200,000

2024-07-26 14:05

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Original title: "Super Lucky Miner! Palm-sized "Lotto Miner" Mined 6.5 Million Bitcoins, Winning Chance is Only 1 in 1.1 Billion"

Original Author: James, BlockTempo

Bitcoin mining equipment retailer Altair Technology announced today (25) that a Bitcoin micro-miner Bitaxe with a computing power of only 500 Gh/s successfully packaged a block on the 24th. According to the current Bitcoin price, it obtained 3.19 Bitcoins (block reward + handling fee) worth about US$206,000:

Congratulations to this miner, he may be the first person to use a Bitaxe miner with a computing power of about 500 Gh to mine a Bitcoin block on the Solo CKPool mining pool alone!

On-chain data shows that CKPool mined Bitcoin block 853742 at 7:43 pm Taiwan time on July 24, and the block was mined by Bitaxe, which has a computing power of only 500 Gh/s. The miner processed this block containing 4365 transactions and received a reward of 3.19 BTC.

Image source: www.blockchain.com

What is a Bitaxe mining machine?

According to the official website, the Bitaxe series is produced by D-Central Technologies, a Bitcoin mining service provider, and is priced at about $135 to $265. The mining machine is only about the size of a person's palm. The device is connected to the node infrastructure service Solo CKPool, which claims on its official website that it allows miners to mine alone.

Only 1 in 1.1 billion chance of mining

According to data from Bitcoin analysis platform CoinWarz, the total computing power of the Bitcoin network is currently 552.49 Eh/s, equivalent to 552,490,000,000 Gh/s, which is about 1.1 billion times the computing power of the Bitaxe device that mined this block, which means that the device has only about 1 in 1.1 billion chance of successfully mining a block every 10 minutes (per block).

Note: According to the official website of Taiwan Lottery, the chance of winning the first prize of the Grand Lotto is about 1/13.98 million, which means that the chance of the mining machine successfully packing a block is a hundred times lower than the chance of winning the Grand Lotto.

Image source: CoinWarz

It can be seen that the chance of independent miners successfully processing blocks is extremely low, but this lucky event shows that independent miners still have the opportunity to get rich rewards from the Bitcoin network. The last time a similar situation occurred in April this year, a miner won a reward of $218,500, but the computing power of the equipment used by the miner was 120 Ph/s per second, or 120,000,000 Gh/s, which is 240 times the computing power of Bitaxe.

Most Bitcoin miners will pool their computing power with other miners to form a mining pool, and distribute rewards equally according to the computing power contributed by each miner. However, some Bitcoin enthusiasts are worried that this practice will lead to the centralization of the Bitcoin network and advocate solo mining as a possible alternative.