Solo Ethereum Miner Hits The Jackpot With 170 ETH For Mining A Block

A solo Ethereum miner has just gotten what could be described as the lucky break of a lifetime after mining a single ethereum block that netted them a reward that ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. While ethereum’s mining difficulty is not as high compared to bitcoin, it is still a difficult, energy and computationally intensive process that discourages the average person.

However, a lot of solo miners remain in the ethereum ecosystem and continue to make a profit from their mining activities. Although not all of the miners get to mine a single block that delivers a reward with life-changing money. Such is the case of the solo miner in this report after solving a block that netted them about 170 ETH in rewards.

Ethereum Miner Gets Over $500K Reward

A report from BeInCrypto outlined the activity of a solo ethereum miner that saw an incredible block reward go to the miner. The miner who had found a block and then proceeded to mine it independently got a total of 170.65 ETH in rewards for this. The value of the ETH at the time it was rewarded was roughly $540,000 in rewards which went to this miner.

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Compared to the average reward per block mined in ethereum which is about $13,000, this is no doubt an impressive win for the miner, who has received what is no doubt one of the highest block rewards on the network.

Ethereum price chart from TradingView.com

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ETH price trading south of $3,000 | Source: ETHUSD on TradingView.com

Mined on Monday January 17th, the miner got the spoils of their victory in a block that contained 236 transactions, all mined by a solo miner in about 9 seconds. Finding and mining a block like this on the ethereum network is hard and grows increasingly harder as more miners set up operations. Finding one with a block reward of more than 170 ETH is even more unlikely, making this akin to winning the lottery on the part of the miner.

Following With Bitcoin

Although it can be difficult for a solo miner to find and mine blocks all by themselves, receiving the full reward, it is not unheard of that small-time miners have claimed such coveted reports. This happens across various blockchains and ethereum is no exception.

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Bitcoin, which features arguably one of the highest mining difficulties, has seen events like these take place. Last week, Bitcoinist reported that a small-time bitcoin miner had beaten the odds to mine a block all by themselves. This netted them the entire block reward of 6.25 BTC, as well as the transaction reward. In total, the miner made over $267,000 from that single block mined.

The same had also occurred a year prior where Dr. Kolivas, a software engineer that helped develop the CGMiner, recalled that a small-time miner with a low hash rate had also been able to mine a block by themselves and received the full block reward.

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Crypto miner Hut 8 surpassed 5K Bitcoin held in reserves

In its third-quarter earnings release, Canadian cryptocurrency miner Hut8 announced that it surpassed its goal set earlier this year of holding 5,000 Bitcoins (BTC) in reserves through mining. Its Bitcoin balance now amounts to 5,053, for a total market value of $430 million.

During the quarter, Hut 8 generated 50.34 million Canadian dollars (CA$) in revenue and CA$23.37 million in net income, up from CA$5.75 million in revenue and a loss of CA$0.90 million in the prior year’s quarter. The company hosts a sizable fleet of Application-Specific Integrated Circuit, or ASIC, machines used for Bitcoin mining. In addition, it deploys NVIDIA GPUs to mine Ethereum (ETH).

The company’s total hash rate (Bitcoin and Ethereum mining combined), or the number of guesses per second needed to obtain a mathematical solution to mine a new block on a proof-of-work blockchain, amounts to 1.7 exahashes per second (1.7*10^18 hashes/s, EH/s). In context, the total hash rate of the entire Bitcoin network is 162 EH/s, according to data provided by Blockchain.com. As for Ethereum, that number stands at 817.06 terhashes per second (817.06*10^12 hashes/s, TH/s), according to data provided by 2Miners.com. The firm’s contracted mining capacity for Ethereum stands at 1.6 TH/s.

Hut 8 adopts a hold-on-for-dear-life, or HODL, strategy when it comes to mining Bitcoin; that is, it does not seek to sell them under most circumstances. The firm also lends out its BTC to farm yields, and claims to mine close to 20 BTC per day.

Location of Hut 8’s crypto mining operations. Source: Hut 8 Q3 2021 Earnings Call Presentation 

The company operates in the Canadian province of Alberta with plans to expand to Ontario. It uses a mixture of natural gas, wind, and green energy for its mining operations.