How Lady Luck Smiled on One Particular Bitcoin Miner

A bitcoin miner is getting a huge reward at the time of writing after beating out his fellow miners to add bitcoin block 780,112 to the blockchain.

A Bitcoin Miner Is Getting a Huge Reward

At press time, the person in question is receiving a total of $148,000 in BTC. This consists of a 6.25 BTC reward along with an additional fee payment of 0.63 in bitcoin for the work he’s completed. The miner beat the odds in many ways given how many others were working to resolve the complicated algorithms surrounding the block.

A Twitter user mentioned just how lucky the miner was given how quickly he was able to do it, and that under normal circumstances, a single person would have required much more time to place such a hefty block in circulation, especially as the computing power used was relatively limited by comparison. The user mentioned:

A miner of this size will solve a block on average about once every ten months. They’ve only been mining solo for the last two days, so [he] has been very lucky.

Other congratulatory messages came pouring in. While not much is known about the individual at this time, it is assumed that he (or she) likely hasn’t been mining for very long, and that much of this can be attributed, in a way, to beginner’s luck. The person in question had an average hashing power of 6.7 PH/s. At the time the block was added to the chain, bitcoin’s total hash rate was around 308,262.

This means the solo miner’s power represented about 0.002 percent of the entire computational power of the blockchain. To put things bluntly, that’s practically nothing. The miner – who simply goes by the name Pineconeeee – explained in an online forum:

Indeed, it is great luck to catch a block with such a hash rate. In less than a day, luck smiled on me.

He later went on to mention that he’s from Russia, and that he rented extra power over the course of a single day through a service known as Nice Hash. Typically, the miner uses computing power of around 270 TH/s, though he was able to rent five PH/s worth of power to get the job done. The block added to the chain contained more than 3,000 transactions and close to 17,000 worth of BTC volume.

So Many People Aren’t Happy

Bitcoin and crypto mining have received something of a bad rap in recent years from environmentalists, who believe the practice should be banned given its allegedly leading Mother Earth down a dreary and dark path that it will likely never return from.

Several reports and documents have been produced in recent years claiming that crypto mining uses more electricity than most of the world’s developing nations.

Tags: bitcoin, blockchain, miner