A 500Gh Bitcoin mining device mined a block, earning $200K BTC and surprising the entire crypto community.

Unexpected Jackpot for Solo Miner

According to an X post from Altair Technology, a vendor of Bitcoin mining equipment, a device with a hashrate of 500 gigahashes per second (Gh/s) was able to mine a block on July 24. The current price of Bitcoin gives the block a value of around $206,000.

As stated in the post:

According to the YouTube channel "How Much?" the gadget, made by D-Central Technologies and referred to as a "Bitaxe," is about the size of a human hand.

Solo CKPool's Role in Mining

When it mined the block, the device was allegedly linked to Solo CKPool, a node infrastructure service. A service to enable miners to work independently, since connecting directly to a Bitcoin core node is not possible, is what CKPool calls itself on its website. It is "NOT a pool despite its name," according to the firm.

Bitcoin block 853742, mined at 11:43 am UTC on July 24, was created by this "pool," according to blockchain data. Altair claims that the 500 Gh/s Bitaxe gadget mined this particular block.

Odds of Success in Solo Bitcoin Mining

Bitcoin monitoring platform CoinWarz reports that the network's overall hash power is 552.49 Eh/s at present. This is almost 1.1 billion times more powerful than the Bitaxe device that mined this block, or 552,490,000,000 Gh/s. There is a 1 in 1.1 billion probability that the device will mine a block approximately every 10 minutes.

Cointelegraph shares that operators must pay for the electricity used by Bitcoin miners using their own money, regardless of whether they successfully mine a block or not. Because of this, Bitcoin mining on your own is often like playing the lottery. But it seems that this one lone miner's decision to join in has been fruitful.

Also, in April, a lone Bitcoin miner created a block. That operator, however, made use of a gadget that was 240 times more powerful than the Bitaxe, boasting 120 petahashes per second (Ph/s) or 120,000,000 Gh/s.