A few hundred dollars become 260,000 yuan, independent miners frequently "win the lottery", and mining becomes fragrant and sweet?

Last week, another independent Bitcoin miner successfully packaged a block and received a reward of 3.125 Bitcoins, with a total value of nearly 260,000 USD (including transaction fees). This is just one of several recent cases of independent miners "winning".

So, is this miner just relying on luck? Is solo mining becoming more common? Can an ordinary person buy an entry-level mining machine and still successfully challenge those large mining companies with insufficient hash power?

The answers vary. Although the number of times that "independent miners" (a general term here referring to individual enthusiasts or small, low-profile mining groups) have successfully packed blocks has indeed increased recently, the growth rate is limited and it is unlikely to soar significantly.

Scott Norris, CEO of the independent mining company Optiminer, bluntly stated: Independent mining still feels like "playing the lottery."

According to the data, in 2022, the number of successful block packages through Solo CKPool, a service platform that allows anonymous users to mine without running a full node, is 7; increase to 12 in 2023; In 2024, this number reaches 16 times.

It is worth noting that Solo CKPool is not a traditional mining pool in the conventional sense. Although it has "Pool" in its name, it merely provides an access point. Once a Miner finds a Block, they can keep the vast majority of the rewards for themselves. However, this does not mean that the Blocks mined through Solo CKPool are done by a single person sitting in their bedroom with very low computing power. Some people on X have a significant misunderstanding of this, and even promote this view without any supporting data.

The current mining pool industry is still dominated by a few giants, such as Foundry, AntPool, and F2Pool. Miners usually connect to these large pools, share computing power, and distribute rewards proportionally. However, miners connected through Solo CKPool can keep almost all of the rewards for themselves.

As the Bitcoin network continues to develop, the demand for computing power and resources to find blocks is increasing. Therefore, most mining activities have long been industrialized, operated by listed companies globally. Some core Bitcoin advocates believe this is detrimental to the decentralization of Bitcoin.

Today, some amateur mining devices priced between $200 and $500, like Bitaxe and FutureBit Apollo, are gaining popularity among Bitcoin extremists. In January this year, a FutureBit Apollo successfully mined a block—but this was under the condition that a non-profit organization donated computing power to it. An anonymous miner Econoalchemist wrote at the time on X that the organization's goal is "to break proprietary mining empires and make Bitcoin and free technology accessible to everyone."

Although the success rate is extremely low, it may be precisely because of the increase in the number of "amateur miners" that the success rate of individual mining has noticeably risen. Econoalchemist points out that the trend of independent miners' success has become increasingly evident in recent years. "Every once in a while (and it's happening more frequently), there will be a small device, like Bitaxe, quietly running in a corner of someone's home, and then suddenly hitting a block," he said.

Optiminer's Norris added that it could also be that some large institutions have mined blocks with their own computing power without being connected to large mining pools – which may seem "independent" in form, but are not actually individual actions.

Even the official website of Solo Satoshi, headquartered in Houston, Texas, which sells mining equipment like Bitaxe Gamma, states that using a Bitaxe miner priced at $180 with a hash rate of 1.2 TH/s, the probability of mining one block per day is only 0.00068390%.

But its founder Matt Howard stated that diving into independent mining is not necessarily for profit. "The main goal is to promote decentralization. Finding blocks and obtaining Bitcoin is just a side reward," he said. "For Bitcoin extremists, mining must be decentralized."

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