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Bitcoin mining has turned into big business in recent years. With the block reward halved every four years and more miners coming on board, it is becoming increasingly harder to make any significant profit as a small-time miner. However, every once in a while, a small bitcoin miner gets lucky and mines a full block, getting the block reward and the transaction. This is the case of the bitcoin miner in this report, who, despite having a small computing power, managed to mine a full block, netting them a massive reward.
Bitcoin Miner Gets 6.25 Block Reward
In a tweet, Dr. Con Kolivas congratulated a solo bitcoin miner who had managed to solve a block on their own and receive the full reward for mining that block. The miner only had the computing power of 126TH/s, but won out against miners with much higher computing power to solve the block.
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The miner mined the block at block height 718,124 on a pool that was operated by ckpool. They were awarded the full reward of 6.25 BTC, which came out to over $267,000 at today’s prices.
Interestingly though is the odds of a miner with such low computing power to be able to solve a block on their own. In a follow-up tweet, Dr. Kolivas puts the odds of a small-time bitcoin miner finding a block in a day at a 1 in 10,000 chance. Basically, this particular miner, taking into account their computing power, had only a 0.000073% chance of finding the block that they did.
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Why Is It Harder To Solve A Block?
With more bitcoin mining operations springing up, the global hash rate has gone up significantly since 2009 when bitcoin was first introduced. In the beginning, bitcoin only had individual miners who were mining using their computers. However, as the price of BTC has grown and profitability has gone up, competition is fierce among miners. The higher the computing power of a miner, the greater their chances of solving a block.
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Due to this, the big miners with high computing powers are the ones who usually solve the blocks but every once in a while, the odds fall in favor of a solo miner and they get to solve a block. This was the case with this miner.
Dr. Kolivas who is a software engineer involved in the development of the CGMiner, notes that this is not the only time that a small-time bitcoin miner has managed to solve a block on their own. He recalls a miner a small hashrate had also solved a block on the solo pool which he operates a year ago.
With more players moving into the space, the chances of small miners solving a block continue to diminish. However, this number is never zero depending on how long the miner has been mining.
Featured image from BBC, chart from TradingView.com