Tiny Bitcoin Mining Device Defies the Odds and Wins $206,000 Block Reward

A Bitcoin mining device with a hashrate of just 500 gigahashes per second (Gh/s) managed to mine a block on July 24, earning a reward of $206,000 in Bitcoin.

This event is notable because the device only has a 1 in 1.1 billion chance of achieving this approximately every ten minutes.

$206,000 block reward

The device, called “Bitaxe,” is produced by D-Central Technologies and is roughly the size of a human hand, as shown by YouTube channel “Quant?”

The achievement was confirmed by Bitcoin mining device retailer Altair Technology via an X post.

🏆Congratulations to the miner who probably mined the first BTC block solo with an activated Bitaxe @ckpooldev with ~500Gh hashrate!

👏 Props to @skot9000, @Public_Pool_BTC & @osmu_global to the project!

You can buy these proven winners here👇
🛒https://t.co/fiEPh4pRA8#WeMineBitcoin pic.twitter.com/C6D9Jj1HlR

— Altair Technology® ⛏️ (@altair_tech) July 24, 2024

On July 24th at 11:43am UTC, Bitcoin block number 853742 was mined, earning the lucky miner a reward of approximately $206,000 based on the current BTC price. Blockchain data from Solo CKPool revealed that a total of 2,652.36 BTC worth $176,896,079 were sent to the block, with an average transaction of 0.6093 BTC worth $40,636.53.

Solo CKPool, the node infrastructure service to which the Bitaxe was connected, earned a total reward of 3.13 BTC worth $208,751, including an additional 0.0675 BTC worth $4,501.83 paid in fees of transaction of 4,353 transactions included in the block.

Solo CKPool, as described on its website, offers “a service that allows miners to mine solo, as you cannot mine directly to a Bitcoin core node.” It also highlights that the service is not a traditional mining pool despite its name.

1 in 1.1 billion odds

To put this situation into perspective, according to Bitcoin analytics platform CoinWarz, the current total hash power of the Bitcoin network stands at 551.30 exahashes per second (Eh/s), which equates to 551,303,337,631,415,300. 000 H/s.

This figure is equivalent to approximately 1.1 billion times the power of the Bitaxe device. So the device’s chances of mining a block roughly every ten minutes were only 1 in 1.1 billion.

Bitcoin mining is notoriously energy intensive, as miners incur electricity costs regardless of whether they succeed in mining a block. This financial burden makes solo Bitcoin mining akin to a high-stakes lottery. However, for this lucky solo miner, the gamble has certainly paid off.

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