A solo Bitcoin miner has become the latest lucky person to win the Bitcoin Mining Lottery and bag a $347,455 block reward.
Bitcoin node infrastructure company Umbrel said a solo miner acquired a block via a public pool Bitcoin mining pool, earning a block reward of 3.125 Bitcoin (BTC), plus a transaction fee of 0.016 BTC.
It occurred on Thursday at 7:32 pm (UTC) at a block height of 920,440, according to Mempool.space data.
While it’s not uncommon for solo Bitcoin miners to acquire blocks, this one was more impressive because the miner secured the blocks entirely on their own by running a solo mining pool, as opposed to the common practice of pooling hashing power with other miners.
“There are no intermediaries. There are no third parties. Just pure self-sovereignty at work,” Umbrel said, adding the Bitcoin Bazaar X account:
“Solo blocks are mined by solo miners in their own mining pools hosted on Umbrel servers. Complete sovereignty. We need more of this.”
sauce: Matthias
Solo Bitcoin mining is a victory for decentralization
The increase in solo Bitcoin miners solving blocks is good for Bitcoin decentralization because it gives small miners a better chance to compete with large, industrial-scale miners, many of which are publicly traded.
Pocket-sized Bitcoin miner still cheaper than iPhone
This comes amid the rise of small-scale Bitcoin miners in recent years, such as Bitaxes, which sell for anywhere from $155 to more than $600, depending on the machine’s terahash/second capacity.
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A BitMaker spokesperson told Cointelegraph in 2023 that while the combination of pocket-sized machines contributes only a small boost to Bitcoin’s hashrate, many of these machines are open sourced to counter the “secrecy and exclusivity” of large-scale Bitcoin miners who typically use closed-source Bitcoin ASICs.
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