Each lucky miner could bring home over $266k, as well as boasting of beating “odds in a few billion”.
News
In an astonishing turn of events, two possibly lucky miners from the Solo CK mining pool defied all odds and added a new block on the Bitcoin blockchain in the same week.
On Monday, a tiny miner successfully solved a block with a modest hash rate of 126 terahashes per second (TH/s). Bitcoin mining expert and Bitcoin Mining Council member Hass McCook told Cointelegraph at the time that the odds of this happening were 1 in 1,400,000.
But according to a January 13 tweet from Solo Administrator Kolivas, another miner from the same pool was able to solve a block with a capacity of just 116 terahashes per second (TH/s) – even less than the first miner. That could be just one to three mining rigs, depending on the equipment used.
Kolivas added that the new miner joined the pool less than two days ago, “probably in response to another lucky could solver.”
He writes: “They were perhaps astronomically lucky to have solved a block in that time.
“This is an perhaps crazy luck at work, and a very unusual event.”
‘Crazy luck’ might even be an understatement. McCook told Cointelegraph that the chances of this happening are very unlikely, not sure how to calculate them mathematically.
He suggested that the odds for such a small miner to succeed once is one in a million, so two successes just a few days apart would be at least one in a billion.
Related: Tiny Bitcoin Miner defies big odds to solve a valid block
When the first miner successfully solved a block, McCook said, “To say this is very rare is an understatement.”
Each miner, who may only mine on one or two machines, will take home 6.25 Bitcoin (BTC) ($266,000) for their efforts.