An individual Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) miner with an incredibly small amount of hash power successfully managed to mine a block of the Bitcoin network and received a 6.25 BTC block reward worth $260,000 at current prices.
What Happened: The block was mined on Jan. 11 at a block height of 718,124 according to data from BTC.com. The miner was an individual with a computing power of just 126 terahashes per second (TH/s) on an individual mining pool operated by CK pool.
To put things into perspective, the chances of successfully mining a block and earning the block reward with such a low amount of hash power is 1 in 10,000 according to Dr. Con Kolivas, the admin of the CK solo mining pool.
Depends on how long he was mining for. You have about a 1 in 10,000 chance of finding a block per day with that hashrate, so one block on average every 10,000 days (but the chance keeps diminishing over time as global hashrate rises.)
— Dr. Con Kolivas (@ckpooldev) January 11, 2022
Why It Matters: The demand for mining Bitcoin and the increase in global hash power is one of the key reasons that Bitcoin mining is such a capital-intensive, energy-consuming endeavor today.
As the hash rate towards mining Bitcoin increases, so too does the difficulty of solving the cryptographic puzzle required to mine a Bitcoin block. This ensures that the supply schedule of 1 BTC mined every 7-12 minutes remains intact.
The increase in global hash power is also the reason why large Bitcoin miners such as Riot Blockchain Inc (NASDAQ:RIOT) and Marathon Digital Holdings (NASDAQ:MARA) have attempted to increase their own hash rate by acquiring more Bitcoin mining machines.
Last month, Riot Blockchain said it expects to have mining power of 9.0 exhash per second (EH/s) in 2022. Marathon Digital purchased 199,000 miners in December 2021 and expects to increase its hash rate by 600% to 23.3 EH/s by the year 2023.
Related Link: Jack Dorsey's Block To Develop New Bitcoin Mining Microchip
