You've probably already dreamed of winning the great Bitcoin Mining lottery.
Well, a solo Bitcoin Miner just did!
He has just won the 3.125 BTC reward (a little more actually...) promised to the miner who finds the next block to be added to the Bitcoin Blockchain.
For those who still have trouble understanding how Bitcoin Mining works, I invite you to read this article in which I make an analogy that might help you see things more clearly:
Having Trouble Understanding How Bitcoin Mining Works? This Reverse Lottery Analogy Should Help
In the meantime, back to our solo Bitcoin Miner, who just hit the jackpot.
As you know, over the years, Bitcoin Mining has become an industry in its own right, with publicly traded companies investing hundreds of millions of dollars to own the most dedicated Bitcoin Mining machines (ASICs).
The situation is simple: the more Bitcoin Mining ASICs you own, the greater your computing power on the network, and the greater your chances of winning the reward associated with the next block to be mined.
Even so, from time to time, solo miners do manage to land the jackpot under the nose of giants such as Riot or Marathon Digital.
This is exactly what happened on August 29, 2024. The Bitcoin miner with access to the address 36AisvWi1UiwLTeTZxLzindAkorqeUc3tT succeeded in finding the next block to be added to the Bitcoin Blockchain.
Let's take a look at the details of block 858978 that smiled on this solo miner:
This solo Bitcoin miner therefore pocketed a total of 3.2746857 BTC, i.e. the reward of 3.125 BTC to which must be added the transaction fees accumulated within the block.
For mathematicians who want to know whether this solo miner had a better chance of winning the lottery than of finding the next block to add to the Bitcoin blockchain, I've posted an article in the past detailing all the calculations to verify this:
Solo Home Miner Earns 6.25 BTC Reward – Should You Try Your Luck by Mining Bitcoin From Home?
Generally speaking, solo miners use pools such as solo.ckpool to try and win the block reward without sharing it. Of course, the 2% fee charged by ckpool has to be deducted from this. However, this doesn't mean that solo miners don't go to great lengths to achieve their goals.
Indeed, as ckpool administrator Dr. Con Kolivas reported on X, this solo miner has deployed enough computing power, or hash rate, to force the odds:
“Congratulations to miner 36AisvWi1UiwLTeTZxLzindAkorqeUc3tT for solving the 291st solo block on http://solo.ckpool.org! This hefty miner with 38PH would solve a block on average once every ~4 months.”
Although he possesses quite a bit of computing power for a solo miner, this unknown individual has been lucky when you consider that he's up against Bitcoin Mining behemoths who are using far greater resources than he is to make a profit from their activity to secure the Bitcoin network.
As far as our lucky solo miner is concerned, let's hope that this win will enable him to recoup the costs incurred by his Bitcoin mining activity, which is not at all certain!
