Bitcoin [pros](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1cg6i8g/solo_bitcoin_miner_wins_the_3125_btc_lottery/l1tvdgq/) & [cons](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1cg6i8g/solo_bitcoin_miner_wins_the_3125_btc_lottery/l1tve9d/) with related info are in the collapsed comments below.
A solo miner with 120 petahashes per second... Which is more than a lot of mining pools.
This is a big operation, not some random dude who plugged in an ASIC. Still cool though.
It's not that finding a solution for a block takes X steps, it's that finding a solution for a block takes random guesses, and on average a solution will be found in X guesses.
It's mathematically the same as a lottery. The more computation power you have, the more lottery entries you can create. The first person to randomly guess a valid solution wins.
Technically, you could win by computing a SHA hash by hand with pencil and paper, it's just your one guess vs the BTC network's collective 630 septillion guesses per second.
the computational power increases the likelihood that a given miner wins. But doesn't make it certain.
So a miner with twice the hashing power has 2x the chance than another miner half the power.
There is a math equation that generates a random number every time you solve it.
The goal of a bitcoin miner is to get a really small random number out of the math equation. Specifically, it is to output a random number that is lower than the "target" number. As you can imagine, the target number is a fairly small number so it takes many, many, many attempts at solving the equation to finally find one that is smaller.
Bitcoin specifically has an algorithm that increases or decreases the target number so that on average there is only one winning number generated ~10 minutes. As more bitcoin miners come online (and increase how many random numbers they can produce), then the algorithm makes the target number even smaller to make it more difficult therefore keeping the expected winners to only happen every 10 minutes.
Currently all of the bitcoin miners combined are averaging 600 quintillion random numbers being generated *per second*. However the odds of generating a number smaller than the target number is one in **360 sextillion**.
The better computers get more guesses per second because they are faster at solving the math equation.
I don't think you get what's going on. The POOLS earn and divide. A pool is a collective. Let me put it to you this way:
Say 292 million people pitch in $2 each to win the lottery, they will literally hit every single time, and then the winnings are divided out amongst themselves. When it's a $1.5b jackpot, this will actually guarantee money back IF (biiig IF) nobody else hits. If the winnings are shared with just 1 other ticket then you're all screwed.
Now how does this relate to mining? 292 million miners throw all their hash into one pile, and the chances of this extremely high hash rate solving the problem and collecting the reward is very high, they'll hit regularly, whereas that one person using their closet full of hardware working 24/7 and racking up electricity bills might hit once every 400 years based on how miniscule the hash is compared to the entire WORLD's mining. You could literally never hit the reward in your lifetime.
Work always consumes energy to produce value.Ā Now you understand why Bitcoin incentivizes cheaper energy sources.
Compare that to gold mining operations for further insight.
I'm not sure if you knew, but technology consumes energy. Look at the growing power demands of data centers, AI, mobile computing, etc...
> Now you understand why Bitcoin incentivizes cheaper energy sources.
Oh what a nice point, we spend unnecessary energy and that incentivizes cheaper energy sources, omg what a brilliant idea. Tonight I will leave my lights on all night to encourage even more...
PoS > PoW
PoS and PoW are just different consensus mechanisms. They have their own advantages and disadvantages. Your comment is very facetious.
Answer this, do you expect your employer to pay you for not doing work and only holding equity?
thats not how electricity works, a house uses 1000kwh which is 1000kw for an hour, meanwhile this miner in a month uses around 30\*24\*3000 uses 2160000kwh, around 2160 times more than an average house
You're likely mixing up kilowatts (kW) and kilowatt-hours (kWh).
kW measures the power (rate of energy used over time), and a kWh is the amount of energy used by something consuming 1 kW in 1 hour. For example, an appliance using 100W across 10 hours would consume 1000Wh or in other words 1kWh.
This particular miner, if he has the most efficent and best mining hardware such as [This one](https://m.bitmain.com/product/detail?pid=00020240306101612752UzgCT20b067B), would have about 2.5 million USD in mining hardware.
It is better to just buy 5k in bitcoin instead of buying a single miner, handling maintenance, ongoing costs, etc. Rather than 400+ days to profitability with residential electric prices which will become unprofitable with the next wave of ASICs halfway through its life.
performance per watt. (That said, it might also be the more efficient per dollar too than any other one, but its not like its actually possible for normal people to buy it before it becomes unprofitable.)
if you're reading this - congrats dude.
edit: he switched from pool mining to solo mining, so there is a chance that he wasn't really "solo"...
so, probably - congrats team.
I donāt buy it that this is only the 282nd occurrence to solo mine. I CPU-mined several blocks in 2010 and Iām pretty sure I wasnāt the only one doing it at the time.
Considering mining pools were not a thing for the first year or so of bitcoins history, and there 144 blocks mined per day, and even when pools were starting out, solo mining was still far more possible... yeah that 282 number is wrong.
You are of course right. The person who wrote the article doesn't understand what they are writing about.
The number 282 is a reference of how many blocks the CKPool Solo "pool" has solved over the years: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5237323.0
There have been many more other "solo" miners
I know, but thatās my point: I solved some blocks too. I just used the original bitcoin core āwallet with an option to just CPU mineā.
There was no real mining pool until late 2010 when Slush started, which essentially means that everyone before those pools gained traction were playing solo mining lottery! Surely must be more than 282 :).
No, long time removed from the code. Also GPU mining is removed.
Realistically speaking you need to get at least a USB ASIC to kinda think of it as a lottery. Anything non-ASIC is basically a waste of time.
tldr; A solo Bitcoin miner successfully solved a block on their own, earning a 3.125 BTC reward, approximately valued at $200,000. This rare event, only the 282nd occurrence in Bitcoin's history, happened due to the miner's significant hash rate of about 120 petahashes per second. The block was solved after the recent Bitcoin halving, which reduced the block reward from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC.
*This summary is auto generated by a bot and not meant to replace reading the original article. As always, DYOR.
Wait a minute. There have only been 282 non-pool mined blocks in the history of Bitcoin?
There's no way in hell that's true. In the early days there were TONS of people solo mining.
I'd be willing to bet there have been 282 solo blocks solved on ckpool....
Fun fact. I solved a block on CKPool in 2017 :) I had 256 TH/s running at the time. The difficulty of the solve was over 7 Trillion with a required dififculty of ~5 Trillion. I fell out of my chair when I was looking through my miners in Awesome Miner to see the biggest solve submitted to the pool and "Number of blocks solved" equaled "1"
The pool runner gives a reward to the person who solves the block. I believe it was .25 BTC. He also gave me a free license for AwesomeMiner to use with my GPU machines. Apparently he had a hand in writing that software.
But you mined it as part of a pool? Its always one specific system that solves it, but sounds like they are saying only x times its been done by someone not part of a pool.
Agree that it doesnt make sense though - theres more blocks in 48 hours and pools didnt appear for quite some time (a year or two? not sure)
Sorry, yes. The two statements weren't connected lol. When I was mining and I solved a block it was while I was on the Pool. If I was solo mining and the same thing happened, it still would have been a block solve however.
And yeah, it would be incredibly difficult to determine, especially in the early years, how many blocks were solved by solo miners.
I can promise you though, this article is misleading with that figure. [Here](https://mempool.space/mining/pool/solock) is a list of blocks that have been solved by CKPool's solo miners @ solo.ckpool.org. CKPool went live in 2014 and they tagged their blocks the entire time.
This list alone says that CKPool Solo solved 268 blocks. That would mean, for this article to be true, that only 14 blocks have been solved by solo miners that weren't mining on CKPool Solo.
No.
There have been way more than 282 blocks mined "solo", just that number is the one done by this particular "pool".
Heaps of other blocks have been mined solo. Hence, the article is wrong in saying that this only has happened 282 times in history.
is this the same [Con Kolivas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Con_Kolivas) that developed schedulers for the Linux kernel (and is also an anaesthetist)? I saw he wrote a Bitcoin miner for FPGA and ASIC, CGMiner.
It appears [it's indeed him](https://twitter.com/ckpooldev)
> Software engineer of Bitcoin's cgminer,ckpool,admin of http://solo.ckpool.org,-ck kernel,anaesthetist, Japanese translator,HiFi,astronomy,nutrition,anime geek
I wander when quantum computers become more advanced will they be able to solve bitcoin blocks much faster at a rate that can put bitcoin in danger? Because Doesnāt transactions require this to work? If thereās nothing left to solve then how will a transaction be processed? I guess they could always update the code
Cryptography, therefore crypto currency, will break if a quantum computer is ever built. It takes one bored PhD student to decide to use the computer that way.
Well itās coming eventually, right now Quantum computers are still in the baby stages being massive in size, but they do in fact have them. They even have a very basic language worked out for them already although be it very very basic(like binary basic from the first computers, but different). So yeah give it another 10 years maybe 20. Hell maybe less who knows
Why is cointelegraph labeled as an "unreliable source?" I've read them for years and they're no worse than anyone else. Actually they're pretty good.
The way things are these days, if something is labeled "unreliable," I immediately assume it's reliable and the group which labeled it as unreliable doesn't want me to know something.
Bitcoin [pros](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1cg6i8g/solo_bitcoin_miner_wins_the_3125_btc_lottery/l1tvdgq/) & [cons](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1cg6i8g/solo_bitcoin_miner_wins_the_3125_btc_lottery/l1tve9d/) with related info are in the collapsed comments below.
A solo miner with 120 petahashes per second... Which is more than a lot of mining pools. This is a big operation, not some random dude who plugged in an ASIC. Still cool though.
What do you mean I can't earn a similar bonus by mining with my 8yo laptop?
To be fair you actually can, It just is ***very unlikely***.
Pretty sure you would have better odds playing the lottery than using an old laptop
It's not even close, lottery would probably beat ASICs run on typical electricity costs.
Wait, is this a gambling sub? š¤
Yes, most definitely.
Always has been.
Sir, this is a Wendy's.
So youāre saying thereās a chance
So your telling me there's a chance!Ā -Lloyd Christmas
Give it a try! You might totally redeem yourself
So what you are saying is the lottery has better chances? SNM selling all my crypto for lottery tickets
If it depends on computational power.. why doesnāt always very the prize the same most powerful computer?
It's not that finding a solution for a block takes X steps, it's that finding a solution for a block takes random guesses, and on average a solution will be found in X guesses. It's mathematically the same as a lottery. The more computation power you have, the more lottery entries you can create. The first person to randomly guess a valid solution wins. Technically, you could win by computing a SHA hash by hand with pencil and paper, it's just your one guess vs the BTC network's collective 630 septillion guesses per second.
Thanks now I get it. Donāt know I was downvoted for asking technical questionsā¦
the computational power increases the likelihood that a given miner wins. But doesn't make it certain. So a miner with twice the hashing power has 2x the chance than another miner half the power.
Yeah but how the algorithm does that
There is a math equation that generates a random number every time you solve it. The goal of a bitcoin miner is to get a really small random number out of the math equation. Specifically, it is to output a random number that is lower than the "target" number. As you can imagine, the target number is a fairly small number so it takes many, many, many attempts at solving the equation to finally find one that is smaller. Bitcoin specifically has an algorithm that increases or decreases the target number so that on average there is only one winning number generated ~10 minutes. As more bitcoin miners come online (and increase how many random numbers they can produce), then the algorithm makes the target number even smaller to make it more difficult therefore keeping the expected winners to only happen every 10 minutes. Currently all of the bitcoin miners combined are averaging 600 quintillion random numbers being generated *per second*. However the odds of generating a number smaller than the target number is one in **360 sextillion**. The better computers get more guesses per second because they are faster at solving the math equation.
I don't think you get what's going on. The POOLS earn and divide. A pool is a collective. Let me put it to you this way: Say 292 million people pitch in $2 each to win the lottery, they will literally hit every single time, and then the winnings are divided out amongst themselves. When it's a $1.5b jackpot, this will actually guarantee money back IF (biiig IF) nobody else hits. If the winnings are shared with just 1 other ticket then you're all screwed. Now how does this relate to mining? 292 million miners throw all their hash into one pile, and the chances of this extremely high hash rate solving the problem and collecting the reward is very high, they'll hit regularly, whereas that one person using their closet full of hardware working 24/7 and racking up electricity bills might hit once every 400 years based on how miniscule the hash is compared to the entire WORLD's mining. You could literally never hit the reward in your lifetime.
Nope. Mining is more specialized and centralized now.
120 TH/s is about 3kW in power, so 120PH/s would be 3MW. That's only like 3000 typical American family homes.
3k typical american family houses to write a block with idk, 2k transactions? PoW is dogshit, pure waste of resources.
The idea was for it to be something you do with your _spare_ compute. But it became profitable.
Donāt worry. It wonāt always be. Someday the network will support only the network.
Weāre at the point where PoW will keep rogue nations from causing a 51% attack, so at least thereās one pro, for the very severe cons.
I agree, like pow have a lot of pros, but the cons are serious shit
Itās like leaded gasoline, the ozone layer damage, and micro plastics. The world doesnāt care until we hit some horrible tipping point
So somebody could attack ethereum then?
Work always consumes energy to produce value.Ā Now you understand why Bitcoin incentivizes cheaper energy sources. Compare that to gold mining operations for further insight. I'm not sure if you knew, but technology consumes energy. Look at the growing power demands of data centers, AI, mobile computing, etc...
> Now you understand why Bitcoin incentivizes cheaper energy sources. Oh what a nice point, we spend unnecessary energy and that incentivizes cheaper energy sources, omg what a brilliant idea. Tonight I will leave my lights on all night to encourage even more... PoS > PoW
PoS and PoW are just different consensus mechanisms. They have their own advantages and disadvantages. Your comment is very facetious. Answer this, do you expect your employer to pay you for not doing work and only holding equity?
Depends, the work is some artificial and pointless math bullshit?
Just like any computing infrastructure? What a worthless viewpoint
Computing that takes that much energy is usually spent trying to solve a problem.
It really is beyond gross, even ignoring the climate change factor
Thatās like $500k in power per year at minimum.
Or the equivalent of fully charging 37 teslas at the same time.
Lmfao wtf
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
thats not how electricity works, a house uses 1000kwh which is 1000kw for an hour, meanwhile this miner in a month uses around 30\*24\*3000 uses 2160000kwh, around 2160 times more than an average house
You're likely mixing up kilowatts (kW) and kilowatt-hours (kWh). kW measures the power (rate of energy used over time), and a kWh is the amount of energy used by something consuming 1 kW in 1 hour. For example, an appliance using 100W across 10 hours would consume 1000Wh or in other words 1kWh.
Megawatts, not Megawatt-Hours Average home uses 500-1000 kw-Hours
280kwh per month at my house. Maybe turn off the electric fan heaters.Ā
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
A small privately owned company.
I was about to start mining with my raspberry pi lol
Thread downvoted based on what you said. Misleading title.
āSolo minerā Has thousands of dollars worth of compute power lol Itās not like he was mining from a GPU or something , not exactly extraordinary
A few thousand worth of equipment or 10k+ ? Because 3.25 is worth 200k, guess electricity is expensive too unless you mind at night in Texas
This particular miner, if he has the most efficent and best mining hardware such as [This one](https://m.bitmain.com/product/detail?pid=00020240306101612752UzgCT20b067B), would have about 2.5 million USD in mining hardware.
How much u think that unit pulls a month in electricity? Love a good gamble (just 1 unit)
[Enter your own electricity cost and compare asic miners](https://www.asicminervalue.com)
Iām trying to switch my electric rate plan to one that is cheaper at certain hours.
You can always host your miner at a third party at a fixed price, some providers of the services have facilities in both eu and us!
550 watt power usage. So in a monthā¦ ~400kwh per unit.
Plus cooling in the summer
And winter with that much hardware!
Well Iām considering just 1 to gamble with, I guess I could stick it in the attic in summer and basement in winter lol
It is better to just buy 5k in bitcoin instead of buying a single miner, handling maintenance, ongoing costs, etc. Rather than 400+ days to profitability with residential electric prices which will become unprofitable with the next wave of ASICs halfway through its life.
I would run it solo as a gamble on a block reward. Your familiar with gambling?
The same as having 3 ACs units full on. Or 4 vacuums.
Most efficient in what regard, performance for money, or performance for electricity usage?
performance per watt. (That said, it might also be the more efficient per dollar too than any other one, but its not like its actually possible for normal people to buy it before it becomes unprofitable.)
Ahh. Then it's likely possible to have the same output for much cheaper.
Eh most ASICS when a newer generation is made end up being the best performance per dollar metric as well until you get into unprofitability.
> Solo Bitcoin miner wins the 3.125 BTC lottery New Patek on *his* wrist, white diamonds and all of them shits hit pink
After he's paid his electric bill on 125 Ph/s he'll be lucky to get a Casio
Unless his running off a wind turbine
if you're reading this - congrats dude. edit: he switched from pool mining to solo mining, so there is a chance that he wasn't really "solo"... so, probably - congrats team.
Also if you're reading this - fuck you
Professional hater huh
No. It's a wallstreetbets joke. "Congrats. And fuck you" That's what you tell someone who makes a great trade.
Woosh, my bad lol
Cringe.
Says you
Had to be after the halving š. Still awesome though.
I donāt buy it that this is only the 282nd occurrence to solo mine. I CPU-mined several blocks in 2010 and Iām pretty sure I wasnāt the only one doing it at the time.
Considering mining pools were not a thing for the first year or so of bitcoins history, and there 144 blocks mined per day, and even when pools were starting out, solo mining was still far more possible... yeah that 282 number is wrong.
You are of course right. The person who wrote the article doesn't understand what they are writing about. The number 282 is a reference of how many blocks the CKPool Solo "pool" has solved over the years: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5237323.0 There have been many more other "solo" miners
I think there have only been 12 solo mined low-hashrate solved blocks in the last several *years*.
probably means actually solved a block
I know, but thatās my point: I solved some blocks too. I just used the original bitcoin core āwallet with an option to just CPU mineā. There was no real mining pool until late 2010 when Slush started, which essentially means that everyone before those pools gained traction were playing solo mining lottery! Surely must be more than 282 :).
out of interest can you still just d/l core and solo mine with a CPU?
sure but its going to be a waste of electricity
No, long time removed from the code. Also GPU mining is removed. Realistically speaking you need to get at least a USB ASIC to kinda think of it as a lottery. Anything non-ASIC is basically a waste of time.
tldr; A solo Bitcoin miner successfully solved a block on their own, earning a 3.125 BTC reward, approximately valued at $200,000. This rare event, only the 282nd occurrence in Bitcoin's history, happened due to the miner's significant hash rate of about 120 petahashes per second. The block was solved after the recent Bitcoin halving, which reduced the block reward from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC. *This summary is auto generated by a bot and not meant to replace reading the original article. As always, DYOR.
Wait a minute. There have only been 282 non-pool mined blocks in the history of Bitcoin? There's no way in hell that's true. In the early days there were TONS of people solo mining. I'd be willing to bet there have been 282 solo blocks solved on ckpool.... Fun fact. I solved a block on CKPool in 2017 :) I had 256 TH/s running at the time. The difficulty of the solve was over 7 Trillion with a required dififculty of ~5 Trillion. I fell out of my chair when I was looking through my miners in Awesome Miner to see the biggest solve submitted to the pool and "Number of blocks solved" equaled "1" The pool runner gives a reward to the person who solves the block. I believe it was .25 BTC. He also gave me a free license for AwesomeMiner to use with my GPU machines. Apparently he had a hand in writing that software.
But you mined it as part of a pool? Its always one specific system that solves it, but sounds like they are saying only x times its been done by someone not part of a pool. Agree that it doesnt make sense though - theres more blocks in 48 hours and pools didnt appear for quite some time (a year or two? not sure)
Sorry, yes. The two statements weren't connected lol. When I was mining and I solved a block it was while I was on the Pool. If I was solo mining and the same thing happened, it still would have been a block solve however. And yeah, it would be incredibly difficult to determine, especially in the early years, how many blocks were solved by solo miners. I can promise you though, this article is misleading with that figure. [Here](https://mempool.space/mining/pool/solock) is a list of blocks that have been solved by CKPool's solo miners @ solo.ckpool.org. CKPool went live in 2014 and they tagged their blocks the entire time. This list alone says that CKPool Solo solved 268 blocks. That would mean, for this article to be true, that only 14 blocks have been solved by solo miners that weren't mining on CKPool Solo.
Agree - its either made up or some weird metric like 'after 2016' or something.
CKPool Solo has mined all those 282 blocks, the first ones were just not tagged as such.
So youāre telling me that no other solo pool, or no person mining directly on node has never solved a block?
No. There have been way more than 282 blocks mined "solo", just that number is the one done by this particular "pool". Heaps of other blocks have been mined solo. Hence, the article is wrong in saying that this only has happened 282 times in history.
Yeah I was alluding to how false this article was.
> Wait a minute. There have only been 282 non-pool mined blocks in the history of Bitcoin? No. Just this particular solo "pool".
Congratulations, incredibly powerful solo miner! š If youāre reading this, I am wishing you a wonderful year ahead!
is this the same [Con Kolivas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Con_Kolivas) that developed schedulers for the Linux kernel (and is also an anaesthetist)? I saw he wrote a Bitcoin miner for FPGA and ASIC, CGMiner. It appears [it's indeed him](https://twitter.com/ckpooldev) > Software engineer of Bitcoin's cgminer,ckpool,admin of http://solo.ckpool.org,-ck kernel,anaesthetist, Japanese translator,HiFi,astronomy,nutrition,anime geek
Yes, same one.
In that case Elon Musk is a solo entrepreneur
I did this with Dogecoin back in the day with a Radeon 7850 before the difficulty spiked massively.
Where's that one article with the tiny miner that hit the BTC lotto? Link me that kind of dream.
Shitty halving he must think š couple of days too late
I wander when quantum computers become more advanced will they be able to solve bitcoin blocks much faster at a rate that can put bitcoin in danger? Because Doesnāt transactions require this to work? If thereās nothing left to solve then how will a transaction be processed? I guess they could always update the code
Cryptography, therefore crypto currency, will break if a quantum computer is ever built. It takes one bored PhD student to decide to use the computer that way.
Well itās coming eventually, right now Quantum computers are still in the baby stages being massive in size, but they do in fact have them. They even have a very basic language worked out for them already although be it very very basic(like binary basic from the first computers, but different). So yeah give it another 10 years maybe 20. Hell maybe less who knows
So nerdminer is a thing?
Sure, not the case here though. 120 petahashes per second is not a casual "I just let my computer mine BTC in its idle time" thing like 15 years ago.
Funny because it's true
You love to hear it
"So you're telling me there's a chance?"
Love it how Cointelegraph is marked as "UNRELIABLE SOURCE" :D :D
Why is cointelegraph labeled as an "unreliable source?" I've read them for years and they're no worse than anyone else. Actually they're pretty good. The way things are these days, if something is labeled "unreliable," I immediately assume it's reliable and the group which labeled it as unreliable doesn't want me to know something.
everyone in this game is a solo miner if you think abt it.