Briefly
- A single miner has been rewarded with over $148,000 USD for adding block 780,112 to the Bitcoin blockchain.
- Miner power is only 0.002% of the total hash rate of the network.
- Thread has rented 5 PH/s on Thursday to start mining.
One Bitcoin miner has been rewarded for adding block 780,112 to the Bitcoin blockchain, beating the odds of countless other miners reaching the same goal.
The miner used the CK Pool mining service to create a solo mining pool, which produced a valid hash for the block and earned a reward of 6.25 BTC and a commission bonus of around 0.63 BTC, with an approximate value of $148,000, according to Bitcoin Explorer. BTC.com.
One Twitter user pointed out how lucky a single miner is at producing valid hashes, saying that it usually takes a miner much longer to generate a valid transaction due to the limited computing power they are using.
“A miner of this size will solve a block on average once every 10 months,” Twitter user @ckpooldev said. “They only mined the single for the last two days so it was very lucky.”
The miner operated at an average hashing strength of 6.7 PH/s (petahashes per second), according to ckpooldev. At the time the block was added, the total hash rate of Bitcoin was around 308,262 PH/s, which means that the single hash rate of 6.7 PH/s was about 0.002%. Of all the computational power of the blockchain.
A user on the Bitcoin forum bitcointalk.org claimed responsibility for producing the valid hash, stating that he rented extra power for less than a day using a service called nicehash.
“Indeed, it is very fortunate to catch a block with such a hash,” he declared on the user forum titled pinecone. “In less than a day, luck smiled at me.”
The single miner, who claimed to be from Russia, explained that he typically uses about 270 terahashes per second (terahashes per second) of computing power, but rented 5f/s (petahashes per second) of power last Thursday, according to his mail.
To add a block to a proof-of-work network like Bitcoin, miners continually perform mathematical operations to discover a valid hash of the block, using a process similar to arithmetic brute force.
Today, most of the new blocks added to the Bitcoin blockchain are mined through mining pools, where miners pool their computing power to increase their chances of generating a valid hash.
Technically speaking, it is possible for a bitcoin miner to get lucky sometimes and produce a valid hash on his own, despite competition from other computers vying to compute a valid hash for the next block on the bitcoin network.
according to BTC.comCurrently the largest mining pool in the world is Foundry USA, a mining pool that holds about 34% of the total hashrate of the Bitcoin network as of the last day. The mining pool hash rate is about 107 EH/s (exahashes per second), which is about 15,970 times stronger than a single miner.