A solo miner at home won the «crypto lottery» by mining Bitcoin block #887,212 using a Bitaxe ASIC mining device. Although it is now very rare for this much BTC to be mined without a large crypto farm, it is not an isolated case.
A solo miner at home won the «crypto lottery» by mining Bitcoin block #887,212 using a Bitaxe ASIC mining device. Although it is now very rare for this much BTC to be mined without a large crypto farm, it is not an isolated case.
«Decentralization is alive and well, and Bitaxe is leading the way!» said Jonathan Bertrand, CEO of D-Central Technologies. He noted that this result highlights the continued potential of individual mining, despite the significant presence of large mining pools that dominate much of the industry.
The solo miner who mined block #887,212 used a compact and low-power Bitaxe mining device, which supports a hashrate of approximately 552.49 exahashes per second (EH/s). Modern ASIC miners operate at a capacity of tens and hundreds of terahash, which is approximately 100,000 times greater.
According to CKPool pool administrator Kon Kolivas, the probability of calculating a block with such power is one in a million — on average, this would require 3,500 years of work.
Self-mining Bitcoin is sometimes compared to a «lottery» due to the low probability of discovering a valid block on your own. However, the success of the miner, who received a reward of approximately 3.1215 BTC (about $250,000 at today’s exchange rate), demonstrates that decentralized mining remains a viable option.
Bitaxe is an open source ASIC mining device that encourages community collaboration on both hardware and software modifications. Amateurs and experts can test, configure, and optimize the device’s components. It has a low power consumption of about 15 watts — the same as a small LED light bulb.
In April 2024, a solo miner with a hardware hashrate of 120 PH/s mined block #841,286, earning 3,433 BTC (about $218,500 at the time). At the same time, a solo miner with a hashrate of 7 PH/s mined block #837,814, earning 3,125 BTC.
In October 2023, a miner with a hashrate of 11 PH/s mined block #814,308, receiving 6.25 BTC (about $215,000 at the time).
In August 2023, a solo miner with a hashrate of 1 PH/s mined block #803,821, earning 6.31 BTC (about $161,000 at the time). He likely used ten Antminer S17 devices to do so.
In September 2022, a lone miner with a hashrate of 270 TH/s mined block #752,868, earning 6.25 BTC (about $117,000 at the time).
