To put this achievement into context, a miner with 126 TH/s would statistically face a wait of 9,500 days if they began using their equipment today… that's 26 years.
Mining on the Bitcoin blockchain is far from easy these days.
Not only are there fewer coins to find, but increased competition means miners need sophisticated equipment and abundant access to electricity in order to succeed.
Major mining pools dominate the landscape — controlling sizable chunks of Bitcoin's total hashrate and receiving the lion share of rewards every time a new block is added to the network.
That's bad news for everyday crypto enthusiasts, and long gone are the days where BTC could simply be mined on a laptop.
But it isn't impossible for small players to be given the lucrative honor of mining the next block — and on Tuesday, one lucky individual beat the odds and earned a life-changing sum of money.
The miner in question had just 126 terahashes per second of computing power to their name — and according to The Block, they only had a 1 in 1.36 million chance of being selected to mine a block.
Listen to the CoinMarketRecap podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts
'This is Fun'
A new block is added to the Bitcoin blockchain every 10 minutes, and the miner in question will now receive 6.25 BTC — that's worth $266,235 at the time of writing.
To put this achievement into context, a miner with 126 TH/s would statistically face a wait of 9,500 days if they began using their equipment today… that's 26 years.
There are some things we don't know, too. One of them concerns how long the miner has been attempting to win the block race — and the size of the electricity bill that they've amassed along the way.
Wolfie Zhao from The Block Research said:
"This is fun. Winning full Bitcoin block rewards with only 0.000073% of the current total hashrate. Either extraordinary luck or persistent Proof-of-Work, or both."
And Dr Con Kolivas, an admin at the Bitcoin mining pool that the lucky enthusiast had used, said:
"For the miner involved it's a once in a lifetime chance … It's usually larger miners that solve blocks statistically but there is no reason even the smallest miner can't solve one."
