A Bitcoin mining rig with a hashrate of just 500 gigahashes per second (Gh/s) was able to mine a block on July 24, according to an X post from Bitcoin mining rig retailer Altair Technology. The block is worth around $206,000 based on the current Bitcoin price.
“Congratulations to the miner who has potentially mined the first single BTC block using Bitaxe on @ckpooldev with a hashrate of ~500GHz!” The post stated that.
The device, called “Bitaxe,” produced by D-Central Technologies, is approximately the size of a human hand, as shown by the “How Much” YouTube channel?
The device was reportedly connected to the Solo node infrastructure service CKPool when it successfully mined the block. On the CKPool website, it describes itself as “a service to allow miners to mine solo as you cannot mine directly to the Bitcoin main node[.]” and the service claims that it is “not a pool despite its name.”
Blockchain data shows that Bitcoin block 853742, which was mined at 11:43 a.m. UTC on July 24, was produced by this “pool.” According to Altair, this block was mined by a Bitaxe device at 500 GHz/s.
The current total hashing power of the Bitcoin network is 552.49 exahashes per second (Eh/s), according to Bitcoin analytics platform CoinWarz. This equates to 552,490,000,000 GHz/s or approximately 1.1 billion times the power of the Bitaxe machine that mined this block. This means that approximately every ten minutes, a device has a 1 in 1.1 billion chance of mining a block.
Bitcoin miners consume electricity even if they do not successfully mine a block, which operators must pay for out of their own pockets. For this reason, solo Bitcoin mining is often compared to the lottery. But for this single metal, the decision to participate seems to have paid off.
A lone Bitcoin miner also mined a block in April. However, this operator used hardware with a power of 120 petahashes per second (Ph/s) or 120,000,000 GHz/s, which is 240 times the processing power of Bitaxe.
Most Bitcoin mining operators pool their hash power with other operators and distribute the rewards from the pool evenly based on the amount of hash power each operator contributes. But some Bitcoin enthusiasts worry that the practice leads to centralization of the Bitcoin network and advocate solo mining as a potential alternative.
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