Someone Just Mined a Bitcoin Block Using a $200 Home Miner

Is this actually a thing? I think everyone should give it a shot.

Of course it's possible. You can even mine it with your GPU, just that it is astronomically small that this is exclusively for lottery mining instead of any serious mining. The chances of someone hitting a block with only 3TH given the current difficulty would take about 3500 years.

It’s a once in a lifetime hit, don’t get excited & think anybody can mine a block as a solo miner because it is gery, very unlikely. Obviously it can be fun to mine from home but most of the time it’s going to be at a loss when you add up electricity costs plus mining rigs, maintenance etc.

This is definitely for advertisment, what they did not tell you is how much EFFORT was put in place before that block was found and mined, could be 700% EFFORT or even more. Currently The network difficulty is very high owing to more miners participation. 500gh/s is very small in comparism to the total network hashrate which is about 612 EH/s, I do not wish to go detail into calculations, but  further checking the percentage it holds, you would find out that 500gh/s is approximately 0.0000000817% of 612 EH/s. This has relatively slim possibility of mining a block and further invalidates this claim of mining a BTC block with such a very small hashrate. I think this is only but a hype, drop the source of the info for confirmation. It could be effective in other crypto currencies with lower network difficulties. SOLO minig in BTC requires a lot of computational power and better gadgets, and that's why most people settle for pool mining, safe from big companies that can afford the hardware and power requirements.

The guy is just lucky to hit a block but that doesn't mean a lot of people could able to do that. This is rare case scenario and provably there's less chance that we could see it again. Mining expenses cost a lot and if you just decide to use cheap hardware's then provably you will be at lost with that. For sure this news will create a hype for people thinking that its easy to earn from mining and maybe this can create a short time demand for people who's been caught up on the idea that they can earn money by just running a mining hardware's at home.

That's like a lottery winner telling you to buy a ticket because anyone can win it. It ignores probability.

You can see the statistics for this specific miner over here: https://solo.ckpool.org/users/bc1qk4czgwtfhxwfd9r696kzledtmlu8yukdzpzn3u. Probability aside, it doesn't discount the fact that they managed to hit a block with that little of a hashrate.

This is rather discouraging. Was contemplating trying this

yes of course, its still valid that they were able to mine with an even lower hashrate compared to the one in OP, but this is definitely not a good financial or operational motivation or advise. Not to discourage you fella, someone gats to tell you the truth, trying such is mining gambling and not a serious mining activity.

He definitely hit the lottery, but unlike a real lottery where the money you donate goes to some big corporate overlord, his contribution of hash rate is processing Bitcoin transactions and bettering our world.

Since I can't find it anywhere, although I did not look that hard, is there any statement that it did come from a bitaxe miner? There are a lot of low power low hash rate things out there just wondering if the miner came forward. In the end it really does not matter, it is as stated just lottery mining. If you get a block you win. But like 99.9999999% of the people playing the lottery you loose. -Dave

The news first broke on CoinTelegraph here Dave: https://cointelegraph.com/news/tiny-500gh-home-bitcoin-mining-device-produced-a-block-earning-over-200k-btc To quote: "The device, called a “Bitaxe,” successfully mined a block even though its chances were only 1 out of 1 billion every 10 minutes."

The worker name has a .bitaxe at the end. This would be too much of a coincidence since no one would name their worker this. Inclined to think that this is likely the case:

that's super expensive for only 500GH I suggest getting the new avalon nano 3 its only about $100 and it has 4TH/s of mining power.

Quell your emotions - use your intellect.  Possible does not equal probable.  Like a lottery winner, this guy beat the odds.  Chances are, you won't. That being said, that Bitaxe is a cool looking miner.  😎

every block solution hash is produced by a single device the only difference is do they share the reward with competitors. or keep majority for themselves

Yes, it is possible. Solo miners beat the odds around 250 times but they had pretty decent hash power compared to this. Nope, you will be wasting your resources. The post itself said that once in a lifetime and it happened only once in 853K blocks so the odds are slimmer than hitting the lottery so don't get inspired from this and waste your time by attempting this.

Heh 100% missed that, was looking for an actual statement from someone. Geez, you actually expect me to read???  Cool, wonder if it was anyone here who has bought / discussed them. -Dave

You'll probably find the most accurate explanation at the CK mining pool page. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5237323.4660 From page 234. Personally I love to see things like this.  Sure the chances of finding a block are tiny but it's a great way to learn and maybe get into larger scale mining, these small devices don't use much electricity, there's a cool solo mining community on the thread I linked above, and solo mining helps the network stay decentralised.  I think there's too much emphasis these days purely on what is profitable and what isn't, takes a lot of the fun out of it.

Not very good with the mining, especially solo, but it's quite possible. But very hard, as your chance to locate a block with such a small hash rate will be like winning a the lottery with 5 tickets