Solo Bitcoin Miners Are Winning More Stones Lately— What Gives?

Another single Bitcoin worker defied the odds last year, processing a stop and bagging a 3.125 BTC incentive. At the time—including the deal fees—that was a$ 259, 637 overnight. And it was one of many such guitar scores in recent months.

Was the miners happy? Is solo mine becoming more popular? And is an average Joe wire up a hobby mining equipment and triumph with minimum resources compared to publicly traded miners?

The solutions vary. Music miners, a term used to describe everything from specific hobby miners to groups that prefer to operate personally and silently, are succeeding more usually, although not considerably so—and the totals are unlikely to spike considerably.

Miners without the help of a big lake is” also like playing the lottery”, said Scott Norris, CEO of separate Bitcoin worker Optiminer.

In 2022, single miners using the Solo CKPool—a company allowing private miners to get started with a mine hook-up, without the need to manage their own whole Bitcoin node—solved seven blocks. In 2023, the number jumped to 12 stones. Fast forward to 2024, and the amount hit 16 blocks. &nbsp,

But a wall mined using Single CKPool ( which is a conventional mining pool, despite the name ) does necessarily mean one is mining Bitcoin with very little hash price, only in their bedroom. Some Crypto Twitter spectators have violently, but wrongfully made this claim. &nbsp,

The miners share industry is dominated by a handful of great players—think Foundry, AntPool, and F2Pool. Workers hook up to the lake, share resources, and broken rewards. With a company like Solo CKPool, the worker will get the incentive once they find a block—and stay nearly all of it.

As the Bitcoins community has grown, more power and resources are needed to me stones, and mining companies often are business operations run by people companies. Some hardcore Bitcoiners argue that this is bad for Bitcoin, because the network should be as decentralized as possible. &nbsp,

Hobby mining rigs like Bitaxe and FutureBit Apollo, which sell from$ 200 to$ 500, are now the favorite gadgets of” Bitcoin maximalists”. In January, a FutureBit Apollo processed a block—but only thanks to a nonprofit group donating hash rate ( the computational power committed to supporting the Bitcoin network ) to the machine from other machines. &nbsp,

The idea was to “dismantle the proprietary mining empire to make Bitcoin and freedom tech accessible to anyone”, pseudonymous Bitcoin miner Econoalchemist wrote on X at the time.

Even with slim odds, the rise of hobby miners could be fueling the apparent growth of individual block wins in recent months. In an interview with , Econoalchemist noted the recent trend of growing solo successes. &nbsp,

” Every once in a while, and more and more frequently, that single machine]processing a block ] is a Bitaxe or similar small mining device found running quietly in someone’s home”, he said.

Optimer’s Scott Norris noted that conglomerates could be processing blocks by not using a big pool, but by having a lot of hashrate.

And even Houston, Texas-based Solo Satoshi, which sells mining equipment like the Bitaxe Gamma, says on its website that using a$ 180 Bitaxe machine with a hashrate of 1.2 terahash per second would have a 0.00068390 % chance per day of mining a block. &nbsp,

But Matt Howard, who founded Solo Satoshi, said that getting stuck into solo mining isn’t necessarily about the payday.

” The primary goal is more decentralization. Finding a block and getting the Bitcoin reward is a bonus”, he said. &nbsp,” To the Bitcoin maximalists, they understand that mining needs to be decentralized”.