Tiny rig, huge reward: Solo Bitcoin miner’s lucky $263K break
Overall selling pressure from BTC miners have relatively subsided in the past two weeks.
- A Bitcoin solo miner pocketed $263K in rewards through a pocket-size rig.
- Miner sell pressure eased in March and could potentially boost BTC recovery.
A solo Bitcoin [BTC] miner has made a rare fête of finding a block and pocketing a $263K reward using a relatively cheap mining rig.
According to Con Kolivas, a developer at a solo mining pool used by the miner, solo.CKPool Bitcoin, termed it a “1 in a million chance” based on the type of pocket-sized rig used.
“A miner of this size has only less than a 1 in a million chance of finding a block per day, or put alternatively, would take 3,500 years to find a block on average.”
Kolivas noted that the miner used the 480-Gigahash per second (GH/s) Bitaxe machine and was the 297th solo miner to find a BTC block from the pool.
The miner was rewarded 3.15 BTC (worth $263K), including block rewards and transaction fees.
Miner flows
That said, BTC miners’ flow, one of the selling pressures for BTC, has subsided in March compared to late February.
On the 26th of February, a whopping 21.6K BTC was sent from miner wallets, a selling pressure that coincided with BTC’s first dip below $90K.
The next major miner sell-off was on the 10th of March, with 11.6K BTC sold, about half of the late February dump.
Overall, miner pressure has reduced over the past two weeks and could offer BTC enough room for a rebound.
A similar outlook was reiterated by the Miners’ Position Index (MPI), which gauges whether miners are selling BTC and its potential impact on price.
The MPI jumped to an overheated area above 2 in late February, corroborating the selling pressure that dragged BTC below its former range-lows of $92K.
The MPI recovered slightly at press time and could cap the BTC upside if it surges beyond 2 again. Meanwhile, BTC was valued at $84K, up 10% from recent lows of $76K, but faced an overhead hurdle at $85K.
