A lucky solo Bitcoin miner has just hit the jackpot, netting themselves just under $350,000 mining an entire Bitcoin block with a relatively low-powered rig . Bitcoin historian Pete Rizzo said the solo miner “beat incredible odds” on Thursday to mine an entire block .
The administrator of the Bitcoin mining pool CKpool, where the block was mined, congratulated the lucky miner, adding that they used just 2.3 petahashes to solve it . “A miner of this size has about a 1 in 2,800 chance of solving a block every day, or once every 8 years on average,” they said . (It's an approximately 0.004% chance.) According to Mempool Space, the miner solved block 903883 and received a subsidy of 3.173 BTC, or $349,028 .
While the exact specifications of the miner's rig are unknown, they may have been using several older-generation ASIC miners, which can produce 2.3 petahashes per second of hashpower . Smaller hobbyist solo miners such as the Bitaxe Gamma, FutureBit Apollo BTC, or Canaan Avalon Nano 3, can only produce a few terahashes per second . Smaller still, USB miners such as the NerdMiner Pro v2 can only produce kilohashes per second and are very unlikely to hit the jackpot on a full block .
To have a reasonable chance of mining one Bitcoin block per month, a solo miner would need around 166,000 TH/s of hash power . This is equivalent to almost 500 Antminer S21 Hydro units, which would cost millions of dollars in upfront investment, Cointelegraph reported earlier this year .
In February, a solo miner struck it big on block 883,181, which also yielded the 3.125 Bitcoin block reward, worth over $300,000 at the time . It was speculated that the lucky miner may have used a Bitaxe . Another solo miner struck digital gold in early June, successfully mining 899,826, earning a reward worth $330,000, which was even rarer amid .