Without a doubt the luckiest solo miner, and perhaps the luckiest individual, in recorded history found a block Sunday night and won the entire 6.25 Bitcoin block reward, worth approximately $400,000. What makes this so incredible is that the miner only had about 20 KH of power. To put it in perspective, that is 3.66e+16 of the current total hash rate of the Bitcoin network.
Paul Gosker, CEO of Compass Mining, announced the improbable news on StackerNews, saying that this particular miner was a NerdMiner hosted on behalf of a Compass customer. NerdMiners is a small computer that enables you to mine Bitcoin from home with a tiny amount of hash rate. NerdMiners are marketed as an inexpensive accessible way to learn about Bitcoin mining. While they are not designed or marketed for commercial use, Compass Mining does make them available to customers who do not have access to reliable electricity and will host them for a small fee.
“A miner of this size would only solve a block solo on average once every 273 BILLION YEARS at the current mining difficulty,” Gosker wrote. "This miner is quite possibly the luckiest son-of-a-bitch in history", he added.
While its hard to quantify luck and some would argue surviving an accident or illness against all odds is priceless, this solo miner's feat is possibly the most improbable event for which the odds are known and the outcome is provable. According to reports, The Guinness World Records is planning to visit the Compass mining facility where this NerdMiner is hosted in order to verify the numbers for consideration in the organization's 2025 publication.
The owner of record for the NerdMiner, who wished to remain anonymous, told The Bugle she was considering donating the device to a technology museum however the status of her plans was in limbo as she has been unable to get in touch with anyone at Compass and Compass customer service has not responded to any of her submitted tickets since she signed up with the platform in 2021.