Individual ETH Miner Hits The Jackpot, Earns $540K Block Reward

An individual miner has beaten the odds and managed to gain 168 ETH from a solo mining pool this week. It is expected to be worth 42 times the average block reward.

The ETH miner struck the block on his own and received a reward valued at $540,000.

He was working through the 2Miners: Solo pool on Monday when they mined an entire block and received 168 ETH. That reward vastly outstrips the per-block average reward of about 4 ETH according to BitInfoCharts.

The size and hash power of the Solo pool is quite remarkable. It is small with only 854 miners online and shows 1.5 terahashes per second at the time of writing, meaning that the average miner contributes 1.85 gigahashes per second (GH/s). The lucky miner currently contributes 2.25 GH/s, which could be generated with one to 20 of the latest GPU devices.

Note: Hash power is the amount of computer processing power a device contributes to a proof-of-work blockchain like ETH and BTC. More hash power helps secure the network by processing transactions and mining blocks.

The ETH Jackpot Was The Third One In A Series Of Jackpots

This lucky jackpot was the third one in just 2 weeks where an individual crypto miner has hit the big time. A BTC miner from Solo CK managed to rake in 6.25 BTC for mining an entire block on their own on January 11. Two days later, another solo miner, using Solo CK again, mined a new block on BTC with only one to three rigs.

Each miner had a 1 in 1,400,000 chance of mining an entire block, and the chances of two tiny miners managing the same feat in the same week have been estimated at 1 in 1 billion.

Average daily ETH mining profitability has been declining since it spiked to an all-time high of $0.282 on May 12. The average profitability is now about $0.0474. This is partly due to the ETH Improvement Proposal 1559, which burns fees instead of distributing them to miners.