Individual Bitcoin Miner With Only 120TH Computing Power Solves a Valid Block

On Tuesday, a single miner received a 6.25 BTC reward, which was worth roughly $265,600 while writing this article, after adding a fresh valid block to the Bitcoin blockchain. Interestingly, the miner’s hashrate (computing power) was only about 120 TH/s in the mining pool Solo CK.

“Kudos to a bitcoin miner with just 126TH that processed a solo block on http://solo.ckpool.org,” tweeted Dr. Con Kolivas, manager of Solo CK. The miner, who is a lone worker as per Solo CK pool statistics, won the bitcoin mining prize while the cards were stacked against them. Kolivas noted that “with that hashrate, you have around a 1 in 10,000 chance of locating a block each day.”

In comparison, their 120 TH/s hashrate is 0.00012 EH/s and represents for around 0.0000007% of the overall Bitcoin blockchain hash rate. A majority of public bitcoin miners have hashrate capacities ranging from 1 to 5 EH/s, which is over 10,000 times more than the capability of this solitary miner.

Congratulations to a bitcoin miner with only 126TH who solved a solo block on https://t.co/UWgBvLBGsc see: https://t.co/JUMEFaYKfo

— Dr. Con Kolivas (@ckpooldev) January 11, 2022

Bitcoin mining is a competitive activity, which involves miners competing to become the foremost to discover a valid hash that is less than the network’s limit at any given moment. Contrary to popular opinion, the calculation used to obtain a hash is simple and easy. The difficulty is in determining a valid hash that is within the bounds defined by the Bitcoin blockchain network’s mining complexity at the time.

The maximum hashes a miner can complete per second, the more probable it is that they will identify a legitimate block, transmit it to the network, and collect the block reward as they computing power enables testing multiple combos every second.

Relatively tiny miners, on the other hand, may still strike gold since the hash function produces vastly disparate hashes when provided even slightly varied inputs. Miners often repeat fast by altering the nonce and the trades chosen in order to obtain the ideal set of inputs that produces a legitimate hash.