A solo miner won a 6.25 BTC reward on Tuesday, worth about $265,600 at the time of writing, after being able to add a new valid block to the Bitcoin network with a hashrate capacity of just about 120 TH/s in the mining pool Solo CK.
“Congratulations to a bitcoin miner with only 126TH who solved a solo block on http://solo.ckpool.org,” Solo CK administrator, Dr. Con Kolivas, tweeted.
The miner, which according to Solo CK pool stats is an individual worker, won the bitcoin mining lottery when odds were against them. Kolivas explained there is “about a 1 in 10,000 chance of finding a block per day with that hashrate.” For perspective, their 120 TH/s hashrate equals 0.00012 EH/s and accounts for about 0.0000007% of the total Bitcoin network hash rate. Most public bitcoin miners have a hashrate capacity between 1 and 5 EH/s, more than 10,000 times greater than this solo miner’s capacity.
Bitcoin mining is an activity in which miners compete for being the first to find a valid hash below the network’s threshold at any given time. Despite common beliefs, the computation performed to find a hash is not complex but straightforward. The difficulty lies in finding a valid hash, one that falls within the boundaries set by the Bitcoin network’s mining difficulty in that epoch.
The more hashes per second a miner can perform, the more likely they are to find a valid block, broadcast it to the network, and receive the block reward since they can try more combinations each second. However, small miners can still hit the jackpot as the hash function outputs widely different hashes given even slightly different inputs. Miners often iterate quickly by changing the nonce and the transactions selected as it seeks to find the perfect combination of inputs that outputs a valid hash.