What is the probability of winning 6.25 bitcoins by mining alone, that is to say without going through a pool?
Solo Mining
Miners help secure Bitcoin by providing energy in the form of electricity. These electrons are used to run ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits). That is, integrated circuits (microprocessors) designed to hash with the SHA-256 algorithm.
This process is called “Proof of Work”. Miners repeat the same hashing operation hundreds of billions of billions of times per second until they find a valid hash. The difficulty is adjusted every two weeks so that there is only one every ten minutes or so.
The miner who finds a good hash obtains the right to validate a batch of transactions. The latter must not weigh more than one million bytes (we speak of “blocks” of 1 MB). Which gives us a big handful of transactions per second.
In exchange for their energy, miners receive 6.25 BTC for each block. Nevertheless, very few receive all of these 6.25 BTC. The reason being that miners group together in large pools to smooth out revenue.
A pool is a kind of cooperative where the harvest of BTC is shared in proportion to the hashrate contributed by each. How do the pools verify these astronomical volumes of hashes? Go to our article: Bitcoin Mining – How It Really Works ?
But some miners decide to go solo, hoping one day to win the martingale. Clearly, touch 6.25 BTC for them alone, or 190,000 dollars at the time of this writing.
46 years of hashrate
The probability of a solo miner winning the hash race is simply calculated by dividing their hashrate by the global hashrate.
Let’s imagine a miner owns a single Antminer. Let’s say the S19 XP model which produces 140 TH/s. That’s 140 trillion hashes per second.
And let’s say the global hashrate is 350 PE/s (350 billion billion hashes per second). The minor solo therefore owns 1/2,500,000 of the total hashrate. It has a 0.00004% chance of finding a valid block (hash) every ten minutes.
Statistically, and over a very long time, the solo miner can expect to find a block every 2,500,000 blocks. That is to say every 46 years during which it will be necessary to count on no income. Divide this figure by the number of S19 XP miners you own, if any.
We can also calculate the probability for very small miners like the NerdMiner or the cold wallet Jade from Blockstream.
Jade can be used to mine, but the chances of success are slim. The wallet can calculate something like 80,000 hashes per second. That is 1/4,375,000,000,000,000 of the total hashrate.
A jade will find a block (on average) in 830 million centuries. In other words, you have 200 million times more chance of winning the Lotto.
It is better to invest in a professional miner like the French BBGS which settles in the four corners of the world, where there are surpluses of hydroelectric electricity.
If you liked this article, you will surely enjoy this one: When is it better to unplug your antminer?
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