Surprisingly, a Bitcoin mining device with a hashrate of only 500 gigahashes per second (Gh/s) was able to mine a block on July 24. This was reported by Altair Technology, a company that sells Bitcoin mining devices, on X (formerly Twitter). Based on how much BTC is worth at the moment, the block is worth about $206,000.
Altair Technology wrote in a post to celebrate the success:
“Congratulations to the miner who likely mined the first solo BTC block with a Bitaxe on @ckpooldev with ~500 Gh hashrate!”.
D-Central Technologies makes the “Bitaxe” device, which is surprisingly small—about the size of a human hand, as the YouTube channel “How Much?” shows.
Solo Bitcoin Miner Triumphs
In order to mine the block, the Bitaxe was linked to the Solo CKPool node infrastructure service. According to its website, CKPool lets miners work alone and makes it clear that it is “NOT a pool despite its name.”
There is proof in the blockchain that this service created Bitcoin block number 853742, which was mined at 11:43 am UTC on July 24. This block was found to have been mined by the 500 Gh/s Bitaxe device by Altair Technology.
There are 552.49 exahashes per second (Eh/s) on the BTC network right now, according to the Bitcoin analytics site CoinWarz. This is equal to 552,490,000,000 Gh/s, which is about 1.1 billion times the power of the Bitaxe device. This means that there was a 1.1 billion/100 chance that the Bitaxe would mine a block every ten minutes.
Bitcoin miners have to pay for power even if they fail to discover a block. This makes mining by yourself like playing the lottery. But this miner who worked alone was lucky, his risk paid off.
In April, another Bitcoin miner working alone successfully broke a block using a device with 120 petahashes per second (Ph/s), or 120,000,000 Gh/s, of power. This is 240 times stronger than the Bitaxe.
Some Bitcoin fans support solo mining to keep the network from becoming too centralized, even though most Bitcoin miners pool their resources and split benefits fairly. This recent success story shows that solo mining can work as an option.
