Two Solo Bitcoin Miners Win $230,000 Each Despite Million-to-One Odds

Two Bitcoin miners just pulled off the kind of win most people spend their lives chasing. On November 7, two independent miners each earned more than $230,000 in Bitcoin after successfully mining a block.

Their wins came less than seven hours apart, despite competing against some of the world’s most powerful mining operations.

TheBitcoin blockchain confirmed the two winning blocks. Both miners used CKPool’s solo mining service, allowing them to keep nearly the entire reward instead of sharing it with other miners.

Is Bitcoin Mining the New Lottery?

The wins raise a fascinating question: Could running a Bitcoin mining machine offer better odds than buying lottery tickets?

Bitcoin mining works much like a lottery. Thousands of machines compete to solve a mathematical puzzle. Roughly every ten minutes, one wins the right to add a block to the blockchain and collect the reward.

For smaller miners, the odds are brutal.

A setup running two or three powerful machines could have roughly a 1-in-40 chance of finding a block over an entire year, based on current network conditions.

Compare that with America’s Powerball, where a single ticket has just a 1-in-292 million chance of winning the jackpot.

Even a tiny home mining device can have better annual odds than buying lottery tickets regularly, although the prizes differ enormously.