Third time’s the charm? For the third time since January, another solo Bitcoin miner struck digital gold, solving a block worth 6 BTC, or around $160,000.
The independent miner solved a block that generally would take several years to do using limited processing power. Identified by the tag 151XTfHBfaDqoNWGGeYobNX2YzFFWuB5YD, the miner solved the 275th block of the Bitcoin blockchain on the Solo CKPool platform.
Ck Pool admin Con Kolivas pointed out that it would take 450 years on average for a miner of this size to solve a Bitcoin block, beating 1:5,500 odds to do so as quickly as the minder did.
According to Kolivas, the miner running a modest ~17 Terahashes per second (TH/s) is likely using a single S9 Bitmain Antminer unit. The S9 model Bitmain Antminer was released in 2017—the latest model, Antminer S19XP, in 2022.
A hallmark of proof-of-work consensus algorithms, mining is the process by which blocks of transactions are added to a public blockchain—like Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and Litecoin—and verified. It’s also the process by which new coins are created. Mining secures the blockchain’s integrity and incentivizes network participation.
The more rigs a miner has means more chances at lucrative block rewards and transaction fees.
A “hash” can be thought of as a problem a computer, in this case, a miner needs to solve. A miner that can process a terahash can solve one trillion of these problems in a second.
The solo miners appear to all be using the Solo CK Pool mining service. In March, another solo miner used the service to solve Bitcoin block 780,112 for a 6.25 BTC, around $148,000, at the time, reward.
The Solo CK Pool service touts itself as suitable for large mining farms, “regular miners,” and miners with “old/inefficient miners that will never earn any rewards through regular mining that wish to leave it mining as a lottery.”
The lottery has again paid off.
While Proof-of-Work miners dedicate hardware resources to secure the network, in comparison Proof-of-Stake “validators” dedicate their cryptocurrency, leading to claims that PoS blockchains are better for the environment as they consume less energy.
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