Miner finds block alone and earns US$222,000 in Bitcoin
Against the odds, a solo Bitcoin (BTC) miner found a block alone and earned both the reward and block fees. However, this event was even more extraordinary due to the fact that the network's computational power (hash rate) was at historic highs.
Greater computational power means it is more difficult for miners to find blocks on their own. But this miner ignored the low chance and took $222,455 with a single block of BTC. The amount includes both the 3,125 BTC reward per block and the fees paid on transactions.
In such an extreme competition, a single person winning such a lucrative block is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Last year, several miners managed to find blocks on their own using homemade machines. Despite the difficulty, devices such as the famous Bitaxe and NerdMiner have increased these chances.
Block 867,118 in a single mining company
According to Blockstream's block explorer, the miner found the block height 867,118. This block contained 3,285 transactions and was processed this Friday (25). Although the price of BTC is consolidating, it reached a peak of US$69 thousand before, which positively impacted profits.
In total, the block earned the miner around 3.32 BTC, with 0.06 BTC coming from transaction fees. The reward itself was slightly normal due to the high number of transactions.
This is the second time in less than a month that a block on the network has fallen into the hands of a solo miner. Last month, another miner earned $180,000 after validating Block 860,749. This block contained 5,935 transactions, which gave the miner 3,169 BTC in rewards.
The most impressive thing here is that the miner only used 0.098% of the computing power, which is quite low. The chances of finding a block using this computational power are much lower than the chances of winning Mega-Sena by making the minimum bet of six numbers.
With just 0.12% of Bitcoin's hash rate, another solo miner earned $200,000 after mining Block 858,978. Although rare, miners have already found 300 blocks from more than 800,000 miners since January 2009.
Homemade mining potential?
Bitcoin mining has more unpredictability in its revenue as there are limited blocks to mine and strong competition from mining pools. Nowadays, several companies have huge warehouses of machines that are on 24 hours a day in search of blocks.
For some miners, this “industrial capacity” goes against Satoshi's objective, whose idea was for Bitcoin to be mined on normal computers. But advancing technology created ASIC chips, which exponentially increased the speed of mining – and its costs.
Even so, as the price of Bitcoin is rising, miners are still looking to get lucky. Many, like this week's lucky guy, choose to mine at home using simple equipment like NerdMiners and Bitaxe. These small miners have an almost negligible hash rate, but can generate a huge fortune if they discover a block.