"Lottery-style" mining, why do independent miners frequently win block prizes?

Author: Mat Di Salvo , Decrypt

Compiled: Feilx, PANews

Last week, another Bitcoin miner broke the routine and processed a block independently and received a reward of 3.125 Bitcoins. The reward at that time (including transaction fees) was $259,637. In recent months, there have been many independent miners mining Bitcoin blocks.

Is it a miner lucky? Is independent mining becoming more and more common? Can an average person connect an amateur miner and succeed with minimal resources compared to a publicly traded miner?

The answers vary. The term “independent miner” is used to describe all kinds of miners from personal hobbies to groups that prefer to operate cautiously privately. Their success is getting more and more frequent, but not significantly increasing—and the total is unlikely to soar significantly.

Scott Norris, CEO of independent bitcoin miner Optiminer, said mining without large pool support "still like buying lottery tickets."

In 2022, independent miners using Solo CKPool, a service that allows anonymous miners to mine without running their own full Bitcoin nodes, processed 7 blocks. In 2023, this number jumped to 12 blocks. This figure reaches 16 blocks in 2024.

However, blocks mined with Solo CKPool do not necessarily mean that someone mines Bitcoin at an extremely low hash rate alone in their bedroom. Some cryptographers have made this statement, but this is wrong.

The mining pool industry is dominated by a few large companies—such as Foundry, AntPool and F2Pool. Miners connect to mining pools, share resources and allocate rewards. With a service like Solo CKPool, miners get rewards once they find a block and retain almost all of them.

With the development of the Bitcoin network, mining requires more electricity and resources, and mining is usually a business run by listed companies. Some Bitcoin enthusiasts believe this is not good for Bitcoin, because the Bitcoin network should be as decentralized as possible.

Amateur mining equipment like Bitaxe and FutureBit Apollo, which costs from $200 to $500, has now become the favorite device of "Bitcoin Extremists". In January, a FutureBit Apollo processed a block, but this was thanks to a nonprofit donating the hashrate from other machines to the machine.

At the time, anonymous Bitcoin miner Econoalchemist said on the X platform that their idea was to "dismantle the proprietary mining empire so that everyone can access bitcoin and free technology."

Although the possibility of this vision being realized is small, the rise of amateur miners in recent months may be driving a significant increase in personal mining success rates.

“Every time, and more often, a Bitaxe or similar small mining equipment handles a block independently and runs quietly in someone’s home,” Econoalchemist said.

Optimer's Scott Norris points out that enterprises can handle blocks instead of using large mining pools, but have a large hash rate.

Even Solo Satoshi, headquartered in Houston, Texas, sells mining equipment such as Bitaxe Gamma, said on its website that using a Bitaxe machine worth $180 with a hash rate of 1.2 TH/s, the chance of digging a block per day is 0.00068390%.

But Matt Howard, founder of Solo Satoshi, said investing in independent mining is not necessarily to make money. "The main goal is to further decentralize. Finding a block and getting a Bitcoin reward is an added benefit. For Bitcoin extremists, they understand that mining needs decentralization."

Related Reading: Can you still participate in mining in the context of global relaxation of BTC mining supervision?