Solo Bitcoin Miners win more blocks lately – what gives?

Another solo Bitcoin miner the opportunities Last week processing a block and packaging a 3,125 BTC release. At the time – including the transaction costs – that was a payment day of $ 259,637. And it was one of the many such solo scores in recent months.

Was the miner lucky? Is solo -mining increasingly occurring? And can an average Joe connect a hobby extraction machine and succeed with minimal resources compared to listed miners?

The answers vary. Solo miners, one term Used to describe everything, from individual hobby miners to groups who prefer to work privately and discreetly, succeed more often, although not dramatically – and it is unlikely that the totals will spine considerably.

Mining without the support of a large swimming pool is “still like playing the lottery,” said Scott Norris, CEO of independent Bitcoin Miner Optiminer.

In 2022, solo miners use the SOLO CKPOOL-one service with which anonymous miners can get started with a mining hook, without the need for their own full Bitcoin node, solved blocks. In 2023 the number jumped to 12 blocks. Fast forward to 2024 and the number hit 16 blocks.

But a block that is mined with the help of Solo Ckpool (which is not a traditional mine pool, despite the name) not Means necessarily that someone mucks Bitcoin with very little hash rate, only in their bedroom. Some crypto Twitter observers have loud, but have wrongly made this claim.

The mining pool industry is dominated by a handful of large players – think of foundry, Antpool and F2pool. Miners connect to the pool, share sources and split rewards. With a service such as Solo Ckpool, the miner gets the reward as soon as they find a block – and almost everything.

As the Bitcoin network has grown, more electricity and means are needed to miner blocks, and mining companies are often managed industrial activities by public companies. Some hardcore bitcoiners claim that this is bad for Bitcoin, because the network must be as decentralized as possible.

Hobby -My construction installations such as Bitaxe and Futurebit Apollo, who sell from $ 200 to $ 500, are now the favorite gadgets of “Bitcoin -Maximalists.” In January a Futurebit Apollo a block processed-But only thanks to a non -profit group Donate Hash Rate (the computational power that is committed to supporting the Bitcoin network) to the machine of other machines.

The idea was to “dismantle the own mine emperium to make Bitcoin and Freedom Tech accessible to everyone,” pseudonymous Bitcoin Miner Econoalchemist wrote on X.

Even with slender opportunities, the rise of hobby miners could feed the apparent growth of individual block extraction in recent months. In an interview with DecryptEconoalchemist noted the recent trend of growing solo successes.

“Occasionally, and more and more, that single machine [processing a block] Is a bitaxe or similar small mining device that is quietly found in someone’s house, “he said.

Scott Norris van Optimer noted that conglomerates could process blocks by not using a large pool, but by having a lot of hashrate.

And even Solo Satoshi in Houston, Texas, which sells mining equipment such as the Bitaxe Gamma, says on his website that the use of a machine of $ 180 Bitaxe with a hassle of 1.2 terahash per second would have a chance of 0.00068390% per day per day of mines.

But Matt Howard, who founded Solo Satoshi, said that being stuck in solo -mining is not necessarily not about the payment day.

“The primary goal is more decentralization. Finding a block and getting the Bitcoin reward is a bonus,” he said. “For the Bitcoin -Maximalists, they understand that mining must be decentralized.”

Edited by James Rubin