Despite rising difficulty, a home miner likely used a single Antminer S9 machine to beat industrial miners to solve Bitcoin (BTC) transaction block 793,607 last Friday.
As the crypto industry hemorrhages, most investors seek a smidgen of good news to hold onto. However, a mysterious individual Bitcoin miner whose activity bore fruit at the right time may not be one of them.
Bitcoin Mining: A Lone Miner Wins Grand Prize
The miner had a stroke of luck that saw him earn 6.175 BTC for solving in roughly 10 minutes a block that his hardware would statistically take 450 years to mine. The profit earned him a respectable $160,000 return on his original investment.
The recent bearish crypto conditions appear increasingly unlikely to affect crypto investments directly.
Unexpected Gains Come Amid Peak Bitcoin Difficulty
Bitcoin mining difficulty reaching record highs in recent weeks meant the odds were overwhelmingly against Friday’s miner.
Rising miner competition has seen hashrate steadily increase in recent weeks. Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto predicted mining difficulty would increase when new miners joined the network.
The Bitcoin network adjusts the difficulty to prevent miners from solving blocks too quickly.
Greater difficulty statistically precludes individual miners from guessing a block’s hash. The number of individual miners able to guess the hash has declined in recent years.
Want to learn how to get started mining cryptocurrency? Read our guide here.
In roughly the last decade, they were responsible for only 0.003% of solved blocks. You would have to go back to January 2022 to find two consecutive days when individual miners correctly solved a block.
Last Friday’s lucky winner seems to have decided to hold his Bitcoin instead of transferring it to another address.
For BeInCrypto’s latest Bitcoin (BTC) analysis, click here.
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