Despite minuscule odds, a cryptocurrency miner mined bitcoin with minimal power

As it became known, a lone miner managed to mine an entire block of bitcoin using equipment with a hashing capacity of only 10 TH/s. The situation is unique in that it is almost impossible to mine BTC with such a capacity — under normal circumstances, one block of bitcoin should be mined once every 500 years.

Congratulations to miner 1CEmkQkgiCMx6DHSDkHi53mL8oEthCZSw with only 10TH who solved a solo block at https://t.co/UWgBvLkDqc ! https://t.co/0O7A7KR4eu

— Dr -ck (@ckpooldev) January 20, 2023

Despite the fact that the chances of successful mining of the BTC block were negligible, the miner created the correct hash and received 98% of the total pool of 6.3 BTC. After solving block 772,793, the hashrate of the solo miner was 10.6 TH/s. In total, there were 4 machines consisting of four USB drives, with individual hash rates of up to 3 TH/s.

The bitcoin blockchain has an algorithm that makes it harder to mine cryptocurrency every two weeks. The BTC developers have provided such a rule to prevent people from mining all the bitcoin at once. This way, the flagship cryptocurrency is protected from inflation. If miners mined all the cryptocurrency at once, it would lose its value. Bitcoin blocks are not infinite — a total of 21 million BTC can be mined. According to industry experts, the last BTC will be mined in 2140.

As a reminder, according to a report by the Luxembourg-based exchange and education platform Forex Suggest, bitcoin was the cryptocurrency whose mining had the worst environmental impact last year. Experts estimate that mining one BTC emitted almost a ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. In total, bitcoin mining produced about 86.3 million tons of CO2 in 2022. Experts emphasized that in order to reduce the impact of harmful emissions, it would be necessary to plant approximately 431.6 million new trees.