What Happened?
An independent miner successfully mined a Bitcoin block, earning a reward valued at over NT$11 million. In an industry dominated by large mining farms, this rare success story of “small shrimp challenging big whales” has garnered widespread attention from the community.
Experts analyze that such successes are not merely due to luck, but require powerful and efficient professional hardware as a foundation. However, the chances of success remain extremely low, akin to winning a lottery.
As mining difficulty continuously reaches historical highs, coupled with block rewards being halved, even industry giants face immense operational pressure, leading some to sell off assets or pivot to areas like AI for survival. This makes the success of independent miners even more remarkable.
A Miracle Occurred! Independent Miners Frequently Win Big
In a world where Bitcoin mining is nearly monopolized by large enterprises, it is as difficult for independent miners to successfully mine a block as it is to win the lottery. However, a miracle happened on August 17: a miner, through their own efforts, successfully mined a new block and claimed the entire reward.
According to external media outlet Cointelegraph, this miner successfully unlocked the 910,440th block on the Bitcoin blockchain. In return, they received a total reward of 3.137 BTC, which, based on the market price at the time, was worth approximately $365,000 to $371,000 (around NT$11.5 million).
This reward includes the current fixed block reward of 3.125 BTC, as well as approximately 0.012 BTC (around $1,455) in transaction fees generated from 4,913 transactions within that block.
The miner utilized the “Solo CKPool” service for their mining efforts. This service is designed specifically for independent miners, allowing them to participate in mining without having to run a complete Bitcoin node themselves.
What is an “Independent Miner”?
There are currently two methods for mining:
- Pool Mining: The choice of the vast majority of miners. Everyone pools their computing power into a “mining pool,” functioning as a team to solve problems. Whenever someone in the team solves a problem, the rewards are distributed according to each person’s contribution to the computing power. The advantage is steady income, with miners receiving a small payment daily.
- Solo Mining: Not joining any team, but solving problems independently. The advantage is that if a miner succeeds, they receive the entire reward (currently 3.125 BTC + fees, worth over NT$10 million). The downside is that the chances of success are extremely low.
Hashrate: This refers to how many “guessing” calculations the mining equipment (computer or specialized mining machine) can perform per second. The higher the hashrate, the faster the guessing speed, and the higher the chance of successfully mining a block.
In the past, people could indeed mine Bitcoin using laptops. However, as the network grew and mining difficulty escalated, Bitcoin mining has now evolved into an industrial-level competition dominated by data centers filled with expensive professional equipment.
Luck or Skill? Experts: A “Lottery” Under Efficient Hardware
This success is not a singular event. Despite the low probability of independent mining, similar lucky occurrences have happened multiple times in recent months, such as in February, early July, and late July, when independent miners successfully claimed complete block rewards.
Samuel Li, the CTO of mining machine company ASICKey, analyzed that these success stories are not purely luck but are due to “powerful and efficient hardware.” Modern mining equipment can provide extremely high hashrates without consuming excessive electricity.
However, Li also emphasizes that this does not mean the chances of independent mining have changed. “Unless you control several tens of PH/s of hashrate, independent mining is essentially still a lottery.” He explained that a miner with a hashrate of 1 PH/s has a success probability of approximately 1 in 650,000 during a 10-minute block generation cycle.
PH/s (Petahash per second): This is a unit for measuring hashrate size and is an extremely large unit.
- H/s: 1 operation per second
- KH/s (Kilo): 1,000 operations per second
- MH/s (Mega): 1 million operations per second
- GH/s (Giga): 1 billion operations per second
- TH/s (Tera): 1 trillion operations per second (the hashrate of a top-tier professional mining machine)
- PH/s (Peta): 1,000 trillion operations per second (equivalent to the total of thousands of top mining machines)
This means that independent miners are no longer operating as one might imagine, relying on a small laptop in their room to strike it rich. Only when the scale reaches that of a small industrial mining facility (with thousands of machines and a hashrate of several tens of PH/s) can the computing power become strong enough to turn “winning” into a statistically predictable event. At this point, independent mining transforms from “pure gambling” into a “high-risk investment” with a slim chance of success.
Giants Also Face Challenges: The Harsh Reality of the Mining Industry
This success of independent miners further highlights the severe challenges facing the entire mining industry. Even industry giants are under significant operational pressure.
According to data from blockchain analytics company CryptoQuant, the mining difficulty of the Bitcoin network is currently near a historical high of approximately 129 trillion, with a long-term upward trend. Coupled with the previous Bitcoin “halving” event that reduced block rewards, miners’ profit margins have been further compressed.
To cope with escalating competition and revenue shortages, many large mining companies have been forced to adopt diversified operating strategies, such as selling some Bitcoin holdings to cover operational costs or redirecting their high-performance computing infrastructure into other high-demand industries such as artificial intelligence data centers.
References: cointelegraph, decrypt