Solo Miner With a $250 Device Mines a Bitcoin Block and Earns $200K

On July 9, 2026, at roughly 03:30 UTC, a solo miner found bitcoin block #957382 on their own — using a Bitaxe, a palm-sized ASIC device that costs under $250. The entire block reward, 3.1382 BTC (3.125 BTC in subsidy plus about 0.0132 BTC in transaction fees — roughly $200,000 at the time), went to a single person, according to news.bitcoin.com and cryptobriefing.com.

Why the whole reward went to one miner

The mining was done through Public Pool, a service that charges no fee for solo mining and doesn't split the reward proportionally among participants the way a regular pool would. Under solo mining through a pool like this, whoever actually finds the block keeps 100% of the reward.

How unlikely this actually was

The device ran at around 995.2 GH/s (close to its rated 1 TH/s) and had been searching for a block for roughly 8 hours straight. At that hashrate, against a total network hashrate of around 874 EH/s and a difficulty of roughly 133.9 trillion, analysts estimate the average time to solo-find a block at around 16,000-18,300 years.

As cryptobriefing.com puts it: "The protocol is genuinely permissionless. A $250 device has the same theoretical chance per hash as a $250 million mining facility" — the facility just runs orders of magnitude more hashes per second. news.bitcoin.com frames the same point differently: "A device costing less than a mid-range smartphone, running on standard household power, can still claim the same reward as a warehouse full of industrial rigs."

What this means in practice

Wins like this are rare but not unheard of — several similar hobbyist finds on sub-10 TH/s miners were reported through 2025 and into early 2026. Economically, solo mining on a single Bitaxe remains more of a lottery ticket than a strategy: expected return per kilowatt spent is far below what you'd get joining a regular pool with proportional payouts. But that unpredictability is exactly why stories like this one keep making the rounds.

This material is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice.