How a Tiny Bitcoin Miner Struck Gold Against All Odds! 💰😲

Well now, gather ’round, folks, for I have a tale that would make even the most seasoned gambler raise an eyebrow! A lone Bitcoin miner, armed with naught but a diminutive, pocket-sized contraption, has managed to crack open one of those elusive blockchain blocks and walk away with a princely sum of $263,000! Can you believe it? 🎩💸

This intrepid soul has become the 297th solo miner to strike gold from the solo.ckpool Bitcoin mining pool, as reported by the ever-astute Con Kolivas in a post on the 10th of March. It seems this miner wielded a 480-gigahash per second (GH/s) Bitaxe machine. Now, to put that into perspective, many of those big-shot crypto-mining companies are toting around machines that can churn out over 230,000 GH/s. Talk about David and Goliath! 🥴

Kolivas, with a twinkle in his eye, noted that a miner of such modest means has less than a 1 in a million chance of finding a block in a day. Why, it would take them a staggering 3,500 years to hit the jackpot on average! So, if you’re thinking of taking up mining with a toy, you might want to reconsider! 😂

Our lucky miner snagged a total of 3.15 BTC for solving block 887,212, which was stamped with the time on March 10 at 7:22 PM UTC. That bounty includes the current 3.125 Bitcoin mining reward and a wee bit more—0.025 Bitcoin from transaction fees, as the data from mempool.space reveals. 🕰️

Now, if you were to look at a 1,200 gigahash Bitaxe Gamma 601 machine, which is nearly three times more powerful than our hero’s rig, you’d find it priced at around $158. But hold your horses! According to the wise folks at ASIC Miner Value, this fancy machine is expected to rake in just over $20 a year while guzzling down about $18 worth of electricity. That leaves a net profit of under $3! What a deal! 🤦‍♂️

And if you think that’s a good investment, consider this: 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. So, if you’re feeling lucky, you might want to buy a lottery ticket instead! 🎲

It’s a rare occasion when solo Bitcoin miners solve blocks, especially with such tiny rigs. Most of the Bitcoin is mined from the larger pools, like Foundry USA, which gets a hefty share of its hashrate from public Bitcoin miners like Cipher Mining, Bitfarms, and Hut 8. The big fish in this pond, MARA Holdings, has its own Bitcoin mining pool, MARA Pool. 🐟

While these pocket-sized Bitcoin miners are hardly a gold mine, some of them are being crafted in an open-source fashion to combat the “secrecy and exclusivity” of the Bitcoin mining industry. One of the Bitaxe miners’ builders, a fellow named “Skot,” shared this nugget of wisdom with CryptoMoon in a September 2023 interview.

Most Bitcoin miners, like those made by Bitmain, are closed-sourced, which runs contrary to Bitcoin’s very ethos, Skot pointed out.

“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.”

2025-03-12 06:45

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