The latest Bitcoin news is about a very curious jackpot in the world of cryptocurrency mining: a single miner, without relying on any collective pool, managed to win the entire sum of 6.25 BTC as block reward using only 1 PH of hashrate.
Experts say that with that computing power, on average, a miner would be able to validate a block every 7 years. This is therefore a very rare occurrence.
To stay on topic, in the second part of the article we delve deeper into hashrate and “difficulty adjustment,” as well as analyze the changes in the BTC balance of miners in recent years.
Full details below.
Bitcoin Mining news: jackpot for a miner who receives the entire production premium of a block with only 1PH of hashrate
According to the latest Bitcoin mining news, a miner has single-handedly managed to grab the entire prize for validating a block on the decentralized network using only 1PH of hashrate.
The miner in question scored a 6.25 BTC jackpot, currently equivalent to $162,790, by solving block 803,821 in the early hours of Saturday, 19 August.
What is most curious is not the prize itself, but the relatively low computational power used to achieve the hefty reward.
Indeed, while in the early years of development of the Bitcoin protocol it was a normal thing to get a solo “block reward,” nowadays because of the very high competition it is a very rare event.
Most miners concentrate in mining pools such as ViaBTC, AntPool, F2Pool, BTC.com, Foundry USA, Luxor, and Binance pools contributing their own modest share of hashrate and proportionately getting a fraction of the prize that is split among all participants.
Instead, the lucky miner in this intriguing story relied on “Solo CKPool,” which is a pool where each user tries their luck on their own, paying a fee to the provider for maintenance services and to increase their chances of winning.
As can be seen from a common Bitcoin block explorer, the individual earned a net prize of 6.1923 BTC by paying a fee of 0.0577 BTC to Solo CkPool.
The cryptocurrency money was promptly sent to another address, where the miner likely prefers to store the hefty sum for security issues.
According to Con Kolivas, an experienced Bitcoin software engineer as well as admin of Solo CkPool, he clarified that at the level of probability such a case in the mining world happens once every 7 years considering the share of dedicated hashrate and today’s difficulty.
Nonetheless, this is not the first time that a single individual has succeeded in his intent to win in the Bitcoin system: only in June, in fact, another miner solved the 793,607 block extracting 6.25 BTC with a 16 TH Antminer S9 device.
In total since the beginning of the year there have been 9 cases of lucky individuals who via Solo CKPool have obtained a whole block prize. In 2022, on the other hand, it happened 7 times, while in 2021 only 3 times.
The increase in jackpot situations such as the last one is likely due to an increase in the number of individual miners trying their luck, consequently increasing the likelihood that a pool member will come out a winner.
CkPool wins it’s 9th #Bitcoin block this year!🎉
This one was by a solo miner with just 8-10 new-gen miners worth of hashrate. https://t.co/KGfFOPvtx0 pic.twitter.com/9saqwWyUsc
— Altair Technology® ⛏️ (@altair_tech) August 19, 2023
Miners’ balance sheet, hashrate and difficulty: a look at the state of mining insiders
The world of Bitcoin mining has evolved a great deal since the early days of 2009 when all it took to mine 50 BTC was a simple computer (later a GPU) and an internet connection: now if you do not have sophisticated high hashrate hardware and a backing at a mining pool it is very unlikely to be profitable.
This, as mentioned earlier, is mainly due to the increase in players competing to provide their computing power to the network, supporting and protecting the network from cyber attacks and qualifying as potential prize winners every 10 minutes on average.
An increase in competition is reflected in the growth of the Bitcoin blockchain’s “total hash rate” metric, which is growing significantly over time.
Just a few days ago, precisely on Thursday, 17 August, a new all-time high in the computational strength of the network was reached at 414 EH/s calculated over an average of 7 days.
As mining experts well know, if the network hashrate increases this does not deterministically mean that it will be harder to mine a block and get a prize.
The two are well connected and the increase in the metric affects the timing and manner of the mining process, but in truth it is the “difficulty adjustment” indicator that determines how many hashes per second are statistically required to generate a solution that can solve a Bitcoin block.
This metric, like the hashrate metric (one depends on the other), is also growing steadily and is now at its all-time high 52.39 trillion h/s.
The difficulty is adjusted every two weeks (better to say every 2,016 blocks) and it is estimated that the next adjustment, due this afternoon, will cause the figure to increase by 7% to 56.03 trillion h/s.
Switching the topic, but staying within the universe of cryptocurrency mining, it is worthwhile to mention the continuous increase of the BTC balance in miners’ wallets that has been occurring since early December 2022 until today.
It certainly seems that after the FTX exchange crash, supporters of the decentralized network started to accumulate coins after scaling down their holdings by 26,709 BTC in the previous 5 months of bear market.
Since December 2022, on the other hand, about 11,460 BTC have been added in a trend that looks to continue in this direction for the coming months.
Miners are therefore optimistic about future price action in the short to medium term of the cryptocurrency, which in 2024 will face its 4th halving that will halve the rewards for each successfully mined block.
