Can you solo mine a whole block just by pure luck?

Hey guys, I know this might seem like a silly question, but I'm not exactly an expert on mining. So I’ve just got this one question: From what I understand, blocks are mined by basically trying different hashes for the block headers, right? The more mining power you have, the tougher the hash gets since the difficulty scales up. When someone finally finds the right hash, either by sheer luck or skill, they claim the reward and the block gets confirmed. Nowadays, with hashrates skyrocketing, big mining pools keep getting bigger, making it super tough for solo miners to get any rewards unless they hop into a pool. So, if someone decides to go totally solo and dive into the mempool, and somehow has this unbelievable luck while hashing away, could they theoretically mine a block and snag that whole 6 bitcoin reward all to themselves? If I'm way off about this, just let me know and I’ll happily delete this. Thanks, Alec

There is no 'fully mine a block', each hash is random and each hash has a specific probability of finding a block. It's purely random luck statistics for every single block mined. Same as rolling a dice - how often you roll the dice determines how often you 'expect' to get a 6. But anyone can roll a 6 on the first try (1 in 6 chance) Just with bitcoin the numbers are ridiculously much larger. Firstly, the dice has 2^256 sides (~10^77 or getting close to the number of atoms in the universe) There's also a number of the sides that count as a block (currently a little more than 8^19 or 9.0x10^22) So it boils down to probability, not 'yes or no'. So e.g. a 90TH/s miner currently has an approximately 1 in 11625 chance of finding a block in a full day of mining. So that leads to: 9TH/s is 1 in 116250 ... etc. However, don't extrapolate these numbers into the future, coz the probability changes every 2016 blocks mined.

Okay, thanks. This basically answers the confusion I initially had.

That's true, but I get what he means, and maybe OP is new to the game. People are trying to do what OP suggests with USB stick miners, aka "lottery mining".  There's no harm in doing it, but you'd be better off playing Lotto every week, and I'm pretty sure the chances of mining a block with an ASIC in your home are still very remote.  IMO it's far better to join a pool and at least earn something rather than be disappointed constantly by earning absolutely nothing--all while using up electricity at your own expense. But good luck, OP.  Solo or pool mining bitcoin can be fun, but it's just not profitable for individuals these days.

Thanks for the response. I probably should have clarified that I am not interested in mining myself, I was just curious about how it works in a more technical aspect. thanks!

NO. You will need reason.

I thought I'd mentioned in this thread about how much USB miners were going for on eBay, but I guess it was another one. Nevertheless, I visited Bitcoinmerch today just for the hell of it, and they're selling the Gekkoscience NEWPAC miners at $79.99 a pop, and they're currently out of stock.  I'm not even sure Gekkoscience even still makes these--I thought not, but there's no indication on the Bitcoinmerch website that these miners are used or anything. I found this blurb in the description kind of amusing: I don't know about the "tweaking and testing" but in 2021 these are lousy devices to "get into mining" and as far as spending a lot of money/burning power, that may be true but overall they're just a waste of money unless you're buying them as collectibles (or lottery mining, as OP is doing).  I still love the history behind these and wish I'd been aware of bitcoin back when you could use a USB miner to mine enough bitcoin to break even and then hopefully make a profit.  Anyway, just thought I'd share that and this thread is as good as any other to do it in I guess.

Well this area of the website is restricted to only btc mining. however the sha 256 algorithm has other coins with far less difficulty. quick easy math Btc is 36000 a coin mystery coin 1  is 600 a coin it is about 60x easier to hit a block. still hard to do with a usb stick. mystery coin 2 is 120 a coin it is about 300x easier to hit a block. still hard to do with a usb stick mystery coin 3 is 20 a coin it is about 1800x easier to hit a block. still hard to do with a usb stick So you would learn all of the above suck to hit a block. You would also learn that none of the above are easy to roi. buying a used modded s9 with 2 boards and brains+ software is more pratcial . It likely will not turn a profit. but it can do 5th at 400 watts vs the stick which does 0.050 th at 25 watts since you need to run a rasp pi or some kind of a cpu. along with the stick. but the sticks sell at top dollar.

That quote you listed is indeed completely correct and relevant. I know plenty of people who mine with them for the fun of it and/or to learn about mining. Indeed, there are a lot of people who are only interested in getting rich quick and are: "grab miner, mine, don't care how it works, where's the money?" Yes there are plenty of people who's whole life centres around how much money they can get, and how fast someone tells them they can do it, but there are also plenty more, that are interested in knowing how it works and getting involved at that level first. Yes that is called getting involved in mining, indeed it's not called "where's the money?" Anyone with a computer, and a little bit of nous, can do that with a USB miner. So for some it may be "Damn I blew $80 on a miner that's not profiting" I should have wasted it on something else ... For others it will be "Cool, only $80 to get the hardware to learn something about Bitcoin" Edit: and these things can mine at 150GH/s for a few watts so it's not like the 333Mh/s ASIC USBs of many years ago ... Edit2: youtube is so full of shit and scammers I'd not suggest anyone go near that to learn about mining.

I don't want to drag this thread off-topic, but I do want to reply to your post.  Yeah, maybe I'm thinking about USB miners in purely economic terms, but I would argue that watching a few Youtube videos of people describing how USB mining works would be much more cost effective than essentially doing an experiment that's already been done and documented, i.e., that it's easy to start mining with those USB sticks but in the end it's completely unprofitable--and you'll likely wind up not continuing to use those miners since they don't allow you to earn anything. If you want to learn about mining in general, a better option would be to mine altcoins with GPUs.  It may not be bitcoin that you're mining, but I believe the process is similar (at least close enough for educational purposes) and you'll have the benefit of being able to trade those altcoins for bitcoin if you want.  I'd think that many people who'd be interested in mining would have a computer with a graphics card capable of at least mining something like Ravencoin or ETC.  Plus, $80 is a lot for a lesson on how to mine bitcoin without actually mining any bitcoin.  Why would you even want to dabble like that when that $80 could be spent buying bitcoin or on something that's going to be useful?  I mean, let's face it.  People don't get into mining just because they want to learn how it works.  They want to earn money; they want bitcoin.  But again, that's me pondering these USB miners in terms of their economic value--the only way I really can think about them.  Back in the day, they really could enable you to earn a decent amount of BTC.  Now they're obsolete, and I don't think the education you'd get from owning them justifies the price.  Maybe if they went for $10 apiece I could see it, but not at the inflated prices they're selling for these days.

100% agree with you Philippe For SHA256 algo, I personaly do only solo mining. (I use pools for Scrypt and Randomx algos) I have 2 Newpac USB only because I have one obsession : "Every device I have 24/24 turned on MUST mine something or at least have a chance to solve a block". So I put 2 Newpac on my Storj node. Will do the same with 2 Moonlander on the Lightning node very soon. My solo mining is build with : a bunch of Antminer R4 (8.8 TH/s - 830w each asic) + some s9/s9j/S9k with only 2 hashboard (between 5 and 9 Th/s and always less than 900w) and braiinos for every miner (even the R4s, I put the S9 Braiinos+ firmware, it's good to know that R4 and S9 have the same control board) I use some "half" R4 with only 1 board. With braiinos+ it gives me ~4.8 Th/s and 466w consuption You point is absolutely true when you are talking about mining other sha256 coins. Others don't have bitcoin difficulty... Profits neither actually... But everyone should do their own maths, I am not sure that electricity have the psychological value depending where you're from. I wish to everyone a nice day

The Bitcoin protocol doesn't care how weak or strong your hash power is. As long as you can submit a share, you will be compensated, you might not get a payout for a long time, but you still do earn something. I think that's a underrated component of the technology. I'm hoping in the future mining pools enable lightning payments cause to me, I personally think that the development of these USB miners, low power & hard to detect miners are extremely important to the Bitcoin eco system and we as a community should support its development. Some of us don't want extremely loud, expensive or heat intensive mining rigs. Believe it or not, just 7 of these sticks properly overclocked & with good chips on a Gekkoscience mining hub can make like 700-900 GH/s. 100 GH/s can make like  12,000-30,000 satoshis a year depending on the difficulty at the current block reward. Once you realize that after a couple of more halvings, people are gonna be mining with 100TH and getting the payouts we can get now with a shitty USB, it starts to make sense. That's a lot of money if satoshis do go to a penny or hit a dollar ($10M per BTC). Also to a lot of us providing security to the network and having some non-kyc bitcoin is important. I personally have a bunch of these running cause I think its cool and if mining ever gets banned, these devices along with a $10 raspberry pi 0 are an extremely low power and discreet way to power the network. You only need about 1 million people running a couple of these to get an exahash. the cost to continue mining with these is a lot lower than running thousands of industrial scale miners. IMO it works as a deterrent against large scale 51% attack attempts to the network because our cost to secure it would be drastically lower than anyone with "serious" hash power. We'd be able to outwait them if it ever came to it while they just burn massive amounts of power to disrupt the network. I'm planning on making video on how to run these w/ just a portable USB charger and a raspberry pi 0 W and run it at a starbucks or mcdonalds just to prove the concept. it's not just about ROI 1 satoshi = 1 satoshi 1 hash = 1 hash that's the important part imo

Well my block eruptor 333mhs has been running solo for 7 years now, ANY DAY NOW

A question can't be dumb; only the answer may be. It is completely possible for someone to do that in theory. I don't like the way people put that through though; I'm talking about “luck”. On these scientific (one might say) fields of cryptography, there's no luck. There's actually no luck generally, that's an illusion, but let's leave that for a moment. The hashes you computer calculates may be pseudorandom, because you're unacknowledged of the final result until you calculate it, but there's no way to approach this with luck. You have to deal with possibilities. Let's take the current target: If you start generating hashes you'll realize that 1 out of 16 times on average, the message you hash returns a hash that starts with “0”. If you go further for “00” it'll be 1 out of 162. Currently, to solve a block you need to find a hash starting with at least 18 zeroes. That's 1 out of 1618 times on average which is: 1 in 4,722,366,482,869,645,213,696. Even if we assume that you generate 1 billion hashes per second, it'll take you around 4,722,366,482,869 seconds to finally solve a block, given that the difficulty remains the same. That's 54,657,019 days.

Thank you for the super comprehensive, and simple response. I didn't really expect to get this many responses.. haha Also thanks for giving me my first merit!

That's just statistics though. You could wait for that many days and get nothing or you could indeed get lucky and get a block after 1 hour of mining at 333MH/s with a block eruptor.

for what its worth, my blockerupter "shares": 1089237,  "bestshare": 4557072 Now I changed the addy on it so this is maybe for 1 year of mining or maybe less.  Point is if you have it why not solo mine.  Its like 5 watts plus the green led is soothing

I prefer calling it possibilities. Of course you could. But, it's not accurate to say that since you found a block after 1 hour of mining, it takes around an hour to accomplish it. The seconds I wrote are the average that you'll need to mine one block. If you mine more than just one block, sum their required time and divide by the total blocks you mined, you'll see that it'll approach the number 4,722,366,482,869.

It is also possible to find it after the double amount of that time. We may consider both occasions possible, but their “center” which comes more often than those two, is 4,722,366,482,869. That's the rule. Hmm, I wouldn't say that it's similar. Each person is allowed to buy as many tickets as they want, but they usually buy less than five and they never buy around half of the total tickets to maximize their chances. In Bitcoin, pools do so and you stand no chance on winning this “lottery” if they pass on you that far. Specifically, three pools at the moment own 45.14% of the hashrate.

It doesn't. With lottery, there are just higher chances for the winner to be different each time.