Solo Bitcoin Miner Earns $263,000 Reward With Pocket-Sized Rig

According to Cointelegraph, a solo Bitcoin miner using a compact and affordable crypto mining rig has successfully solved a block on the Bitcoin blockchain, earning a substantial reward of $263,000. This achievement marks the miner as the 297th individual to mine a Bitcoin block from the solo.ckpool mining pool, as noted by its developer, Con Kolivas, in a recent post on X. The miner utilized a Bitaxe machine with a processing power of 480 gigahashes per second (GH/s). In comparison, major crypto-mining companies typically employ machines capable of operating at over 230,000 GH/s. Kolivas highlighted the improbability of such a small-scale miner solving a block, stating that the chances are less than one in a million per day, or alternatively, it would take approximately 3,500 years to find a block on average. The miner successfully solved block 887,212, which was timestamped on March 10 at 7:22 pm UTC, earning a total of 3.15 BTC. This reward includes the current 3.125 Bitcoin mining reward and an additional 0.025 Bitcoin from transaction fees, as indicated by data from mempool.space. In the realm of Bitcoin mining, larger pools such as Foundry USA dominate the landscape, drawing significant hashrate from public Bitcoin miners like Cipher Mining, Bitfarms, and Hut 8. MARA Holdings, the largest public Bitcoin mining firm by market cap and hashrate, operates its own mining pool, MARA Pool. Despite the challenges faced by pocket-sized Bitcoin miners in terms of profitability, some micro miners are being developed in an open-source manner to counter the "secrecy and exclusivity" prevalent in the Bitcoin mining industry. One of the builders of Bitaxe miners, known as "Skot," expressed in a September 2023 interview with Cointelegraph that these open-source projects aim to bring transparency and accessibility to the public, contrasting with the closed-source nature of most Bitcoin miners, such as those produced by Bitmain. The emergence of these open-source initiatives seeks to illuminate the often opaque aspects of Bitcoin mining, aligning with the ethos of Bitcoin by promoting transparency and public accessibility.