When strength is insufficient, luck compensates.

Written by: Eric, Foresight News

In the early morning of July 10, Beijing time, a Bitcoin miner plugged in a Bitaxe Gamma that costs 150 dollars, connected it to the home WiFi, and mined on Public Pool for 8 hours, miraculously digging out Bitcoin block 957382, earning 3.1382 Bitcoins, valued at about 200,000 dollars at the time.

This so-called "mining machine" is only the size of a router: it has a BM1370 chip, consumes 15 to 21 watts, and its computing power is less than 1 TH/s. During the time it was mining, the total Bitcoin network hashrate was about 874 EH/s, meaning the computing power of this little machine accounted for less than one-ninth of a billionth of the entire network.

At this speed, this little machine theoretically would need to wait 16,701 years to mine a single block, which is about the time from the Upper Paleolithic period, 14,000 years ago, to today. At that time, Homo sapiens had not yet mastered agricultural and livestock techniques, relying solely on hunting for survival.

But this "chosen one" only took 8 hours. During these 8 hours, Bitcoin went through 48 block cycles, and his chances of winning were about 1 in 18.3 million.

What does this number mean? The probability of winning the first prize in the Double Color Ball lottery is 1 in 17.72 million. In other words, with a device smaller than a set-top box, in less than a single night, he accomplished the equivalent of winning the lottery, with a return of approximately 1330 times.

This kind of "absurd" event is not the first time it has happened this year.

In February, another miner didn't even buy hardware and directly spent 75 dollars renting 1 PH/s computing power from a hash rental platform to try his luck on CKPool. Based on the total Bitcoin network hashrate at the time, this miner had about a 1 in 800,000 chance of mining a single block, theoretically having to wait 15 years. However, before he even finished spending the 75 dollars, he mined block 938092, earning 3.125 Bitcoins.

On March 10, a 480 GH/s Bitaxe Pocket Rig also struck gold. The 480 GH/s hashrate was even half lower than the device at the beginning of this article. According to the data at that time, the expected time for this miner to find a block was over 25,000 years. Yet, on a day in March, it happened to find block 887212, taking home about 258,000 dollars in rewards. The head of CKPool, Con Kolivas, later expressed on social media that the probability of such hashrate winning in a day was just a few tens of millionths, "purely luck so good it’s absurd."

Since the beginning of this year, there have been quite a few such examples. On April 9, a miner with about 70 TH/s (equivalent to an old Antminer S17+) mined block 944306 through CKPool, earning about 3.128 Bitcoins (worth about 222,000 dollars), with a daily winning probability of about 1 in 100,000; at the end of May, a miner using a small cluster made up of 14 Canaan Nano devices (total hashrate of 157 TH/s) mined block 951771 through Braiins Solo, with rewards worth about 232,000 dollars.

According to CoinDesk's statistics, in the past 12 months, individual miners have mined a total of 24 blocks, and since 2026, 12 blocks have been earned by some individual miners "lottery" with mining machines. Compared to the total number of Bitcoin blocks within 12 months, the share of these lucky ones is less than one-fifth of a thousandth.

Excluding these extremely lucky exceptions, over 99.9% of blocks are still firmly under the control of industrial-grade mining pools like Foundry USA and AntPool. These lucky individuals resemble ordinary people winning a lottery jackpot, rather than representatives of industry trends. But it is precisely because the probability is so low that these stories become interesting. When someone spends 150 dollars to buy a small device that looks like an electronic toy, puts it on the table, and finds 200,000 dollars in their account after 8 hours—it’s something that, even if it only happens once, would be enough to boast about for a lifetime.

Of course, behind all these low-probability events are countless unlucky individuals who have run for months or even years without mining anything, silently paying the electricity bills. Bitcoin mining has always been like this: a few people's stories of getting rich quickly make the headlines while most people's devices quietly generate heat in a corner. However, every once in a while, a lucky person appears who makes others envious, reminding us that this is essentially a mathematical lottery. And this year's lottery seems particularly fond of players who spend a small amount of money to take a chance.