An independent miner with a hash rate (computing power) of just 10 terahashes per second (TH/s) won the 772,793rd block added to the bitcoin blockchain on Friday (20th).
At the time he added this block, Bitcoin’s total hash rate was just over 269 exahash per second (EH/s), representing 0.000000037% of the entire blockchain’s hash rate for this solo miner’s 10 TH/s hash rate .
In simple terms, this is equivalent to winning an almost impossible victory for an independent miner.
Despite the many odds, the solo miner was the first to produce a valid hash for the block awaiting mining, in exchange for 98% of the 6.35939231 bitcoins allocated to block rewards and fees. The remaining 2% is for Solo CK Pool, an online mining service that assists individuals in mining.
To add a block to a proof-of-work blockchain like Bitcoin, a miner must be the first to compute a valid hash for the block, which can only be done by brute force.
The miner uses a cryptographic algorithm to generate a hash value that is below a threshold specified by the Bitcoin network, and if it is above the threshold, the miner changes the input slightly and tries again to generate a completely new hash value. Miners who specialize in mining are able to calculate trillions of unique hashes per second.
However, even if the miner’s machine can only produce one hash per second, in theory, the first output of the algorithm may be the valid hash to solve the block problem.
As a solo miner, the chance of adding a block depends on the number of hashes per second calculated by the miner’s mining machine, compared to the total number of hashes per second calculated by all machines on the network.
Less than an hour after block 772,793 was generated, the lucky miner averaged 10.6 TH/s over the previous hour, according to a post by a user named Willi9974 on the blockchain forum BitcoinTalk.
The post information also shows that ~10 TH/s is the combined computing power of 4 mining machines. This means that the solo miner’s rig is likely to consist of 4 Bitcoin miners plugged into USB, each achieving a hash rate of about 3 TH/s at a cost of about $200 each.
Using the difficulty level contained in block 772,793, and assuming that this solo miner’s rig is running at 10 TH/s, it is possible to calculate a total estimated hashrate of 269,082,950 TH/s when this block was solved .
Based on this, the odds of the solo miner being the first to solve the block with a valid hash is 1 in 26.9 million, or 0.000000037%.
While extremely unlikely, this once-in-a-lifetime event has happened before in the history of Bitcoin mining.
A year ago, in less than two weeks, three different independent miners solved blocks with improbable hashrates, and the third had a hashrate of only 8.3 TH/s, far less than With an estimated overall hash rate of 190,719,350 TH/s, this represents a 1 in 23 million chance, or 0.000000044%.
However, the mining pool is still the winning army.
While stories of independent miners like this one producing a block alone are promising, the vast majority of blocks in the Bitcoin blockchain are produced by large mining pools that combine computing power and shared revenue. Miners receive mining rewards in proportion to their contributions.
According to data from Blockchain explorer and mining pool BTC.com, the largest Bitcoin mining pool is Foundry USA, with a computing power of 90.19 EH/s, accounting for 31.3% of the entire hash rate, which means that every three blocks on average, They get the mining reward and handling fee of one of them.
Mining pools can be traced back to 2010. As mining difficulty increases and mining technology improves, the computing power of these mining pools continues to increase. Currently, at least 98% of Bitcoin miners belong to mining pools.
