Solo Bitaxe Miner Beats 18,000-Year Odds to Mine Full Bitcoin Block
A hobbyist solo miner struck bitcoin’s lottery jackpot, beating 18000-year odds to earn the entire 3.125 BTC block reward without sharing proceeds with a pool.
A solo bitcoin miner operating a roughly 1 TH/s Bitaxe device successfully mined a full bitcoin block on July 10 at block height 957,382 through Public Pool, bringing home rewards worth about $200,000. Public Pool allows connected workers to mine together or solo with no fees in either case.
The miner’s Public Pool dashboard, shared on X, showed the Bitaxe device was working as a solo device with an average hashrate of 995.2 GH/s, or roughly 1 TH/s. At that hashrate and network difficulty, a miner would statistically expect to find a block only once every 18,300 years, according to the standard bitcoin mining probability model.
The event underscores the highly skewed probability distribution inherent in bitcoin mining. Every hash generated by a miner has an identical chance of satisfying the network’s proof-of-work target, regardless of whether it comes from a household Bitaxe or an industrial-scale mining farm operating hundreds of exahashes per second. The difference lies solely in the number of hashes produced over time.
Bitaxe has become popular among hobbyists over the past two years as one of the first fully open-source bitcoin ASIC miners using Bitmain’s chips. The compact device, typically consuming less than 20 watts of power, was designed more as an educational platform than a profitable mining machine, given its negligible share of the global network hashrate, now estimated at around 874 EH/s.
Nevertheless, rare solo block discoveries have fueled interest in the devices, highlighting bitcoin mining’s lottery-like nature. While the expected waiting time for a 1 TH/s miner stretches into tens of thousands of years, probability does not prevent exceptionally lucky outcomes over much shorter periods.
