An independent miner with a hashrate (computing power) of just 10 terahashes per second (TH/s) won on Friday (20th) adding the 772,793rd block to the Bitcoin blockchain.

At the time he added this block, Bitcoin’s total hash rate was just over 269 exahashes per second (EH/s), representing this independent miner’s 10 TH/s hash rate accounting for 0.000000037% of the entire blockchain’s hash rate. .

Simply put, for an independent miner, this is equivalent to winning an almost impossible victory.

Despite facing many difficulties, the independent miner was the first to produce a valid hash for the block waiting to be mined, earning him 98% of the 6.35939231 Bitcoins allocated for block rewards and fees. The remaining 2% is given to Solo CK Pool, an online mining service that assists individual mining.

To add a block to a proof-of-work blockchain like Bitcoin, a miner must be the first to calculate a valid hash for the block, which can only be mined using brute force.

The miner will use a cryptographic algorithm to produce a hash value that will be below a threshold specified by the Bitcoin network. If it is above the threshold, the miner will slightly change the input and try again to produce a completely new hash value. Dedicated miners are able to calculate trillions of unique hashes per second.

However, even if a miner's machine can only produce one hash per second, in theory, the first output of the algorithm may be a valid hash that solves the block problem.

As an independent miner, the chance of adding a block depends on the number of hashes the miner's machine is calculating per second, versus the total number of hashes being calculated per second by all machines on the network.

According to a post by a user named Willi9974 on the blockchain forum BitcoinTalk, less than an hour after block 772,793 was generated, the lucky miner’s average computing power in the previous hour was 10.6 TH/s.

The post information also shows that ~10 TH/s is the combined computing power of 4 mining machines. This means that this independent miner's equipment may consist of 4 Bitcoin miners plugged into USB, each reaching a hash rate of about 3 TH/s, and costing about $200 each.

Using the difficulty level contained in block 772,793, and assuming that this independent miner's rig is running at 10 TH/s, it is possible to calculate that the total estimated hash rate when this block is solved is 269,082,950 TH/s .

Based on this, the chance of this independent miner being the first to obtain a valid hash to solve the block is 1 in 26.9 million, which is equivalent to 0.000000037%.

While this scenario is extremely unlikely, this once-in-a-lifetime event has happened before in the history of Bitcoin mining.

A year ago, in less than two weeks, three different independent miners solved blocks at an unlikely hash rate, and the third hash rate was only 8.3 TH/s, which is far lower than With an estimated overall hash rate of 190,719,350 TH/s, this represents a chance of only 1 in 23 million, equivalent to 0.000000044%.

However, mining pools are still the victors.

While stories like these of independent miners producing a block on their own are promising, the vast majority of the Bitcoin blockchain’s blocks are produced by large mining pools that combine computing power and shared revenue, led by Miners receive mining rewards in proportion to their contributions.

According to data from Blockchain explorer and mining pool BTC.com, the largest Bitcoin mining pool is Foundry USA, with a computing power of 90.19 EH/s, accounting for 31.3% of the entire hash rate. This means that on average, every three blocks, Get one of their mining rewards and handling fees.

The mining pools can be traced back to 2010. As the difficulty of mining increases and mining technology improves, the computing power of these mining pools continues to increase. Currently, at least 98% of Bitcoin miners belong to mining pools.

This article has a computing power of only 10 TH/s! An independent miner relies on 4 mining machines to generate a Bitcoin block. First appeared on Block Guest.