A solo Bitcoin miner with an average hash power of just 10 TH/s (terahashes per second) won the race to add blocks 772,793 for the Bitcoin blockchain on Friday.
At the time the block was added, Bitcoin’s total hash rate was just over 269 exahash per second, meaning that the solo miner’s 10 TH/s hash rate only accounted for 0.000000037% of all the computational power of the blockchain.
Simply put: it was an extremely unlikely win for an individual miner.
Despite the odds against them, the solo miner was the first to produce a valid hash for the block to be mined. In return, the miner received 98% of the total 6.35939231 BTC allocated for the block reward and fees. The remaining 2% went to the Solo CK Pool, an online mining service that facilitates individual mining.
Bitcoin’s Randomness and Probabilities Coded for Luck and Work
To add a block to a proof of work blockchain like Bitcoin, the miner must be the first to compute a valid hash for the block, which can only be discovered using brute computational force.
Mining machines run an encryption algorithm to produce a hash that falls below a threshold specified by the network. If the algorithm produces a value above the hash target, the miner will try the algorithm again with a slightly altered input to produce a completely new value for the hash. Miners created specifically to perform this function are capable of calculating trillions of unique hashes every second.
However, even if a miner’s machine were only capable of producing one hash per second, it is theoretically possible that the first output of the algorithm could be a valid hash to solve the block.
What were the odds?
The chances of adding a block as a solo miner are determined by the number of hashes the miner’s equipment is computing per second relative to the total number of hashes all machines on the network are computing each second.
According to a post by user Willi9974 on BitcoinTalk forum Less than an hour after block 772,793 was resolved, the lucky solo miner had an hourly average hash rate of 10.6 TH/s.
Information posted on BitcoinTalk also revealed that ~10 TH/s was the combined power of four machines (called “workers”). This suggests that this solo miner’s equipment likely consisted of four USB stick Bitcoin miners, which can individually achieve a hash rate of around 3 TH/s and cost around $200 each.
Using the difficulty level included on block 772,793 and assuming the ground miner’s equipment was computing 10 TH/s, it is possible to calculate the estimated total hash rate to be 269,082,950 TH/s at the time the block was solved.
Based on that, the odds of that solo miner being the first to solve the block with a valid hash are one in 26.9 million. Statistically, this means that if the same circumstances were repeated infinite times, the solo miner would add the block 0.000000037% of the time, on average.
Unlikely but not impossible – and it’s happened before
While this scenario was extremely unlikely, similar “once in a lifetime” events in Bitcoin mining have happened before.
One year agoIt is less than two weeksthere was three different individual miners who solved blocks with unlikely hash rates – the third party’s hash rate was apparently only 8.3 TH/s compared to the estimated total hash rate of 190,719,350 TH/s, which is a one in 23 million (or 0.000000044%) chance.
A hash is valid and therefore resolves the block or it is not. There is no strategy involved as the whole system is based on random generation of hash values and network response mechanisms to maintain prime probabilities. Bitcoin runs on code and formulas, so a solo miner somehow solving the next four blocks is perfectly possible within Bitcoin’s mathematical system.
Mining pools remain the usual winners
Anecdotes about solo miners like these could introduce a new hobby to the ever-hoping ones. However, the vast majority of blocks added to the Bitcoin blockchain today were produced by large pools of mining rigs that combine their hashing power and share earnings.
By doing this, each miner’s contribution is rewarded proportionally each time the pool mines a block.
According to blockchain explorer and mining pool BTC.comthe largest Bitcoin mining pool is currently Foundry USA, with their collective computing power of 90.19 EH/s representing 31.3% of the network’s total hash rate – meaning they earn a share of the rewards and block rates to one in three blocks, on average.
mining pools date 2010 and steadily captured larger shares of the hash rate distribution year after year as mining difficulty increased and mining technology improved. Today, at least 98% of Bitcoin miners online belong to a mining pool.
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