🎓 Explain Like I'm 10
Bitcoin mining is a giant lottery. Every ~10 minutes, one miner wins 14.2312 Bitcoin — worth $961,748 today.
On Nov 24, 2017, this miner using a Small mining farm found block #495,939. They were mining alone — no big pool, just their own machines competing directly against the entire Bitcoin network (1020.75 EH/s total).
Winning solo means keeping 100% of the reward — no pool fees, no sharing. High risk, high reward.
🎲 The Odds — Show Your Work
Miner's share of total Bitcoin hashrate
0.000160%
Miner: 1.6 PH/s vs Network: 1020.75 EH/s
Miner hashrate (Estimated from block frequency (4 blocks found))
1.6 PH/s
Bitcoin network hashrate
1020.75 EH/s
Chance of winning each block
1 in 626,954
Expected wait time at this hashrate
11.9 years
Expected blocks to find 1 solo block
626,954 blocks
Probability per block = miner_hashrate / network_hashrate
= 1.6 PH/s / 1020.75 EH/s
= 1 in 626,954
Expected wait = blocks_to_win × 10 minutes
= 626,954 × 10 min = 11.9 years
⛏️ Miner Profile
Hashrate (24h)
1.6 PH/s (est. from 4 blocks)
Estimated from block frequency (4 blocks found)
Solo blocks found (tracked)
4 blocks
🏭
Small mining farm
50–500 machines in a dedicated location
🎯 The Winning Number — Nonce Visualizer
To mine a block, the miner cycles through numbers from 0 to 4,294,967,295 at billions per second, checking if each produces a valid hash. Number 669,064,230 was the winner.
0669,064,230 ← winner4,294,967,295
669,064,230
Winning Nonce
3,625,903,065
Numbers after
💡 The miner also tried different extra nonce values — restarting from 0 each time the full 4.29B range was exhausted. Modern ASICs can cycle through the entire nonce space in ~0ms.
💸 Fee Breakdown — What the Miner Captured
The block reward has two parts: a fixed subsidy set by Bitcoin protocol, plus transaction fees paid by users who wanted their transactions included.
Subsidy — 12.5000 BTC (87.83%)
Fixed reward, halves every 4 years
Fees — 1.731248 BTC (12.17%)
From 2,588 transactions in this block
⚡ Solo miners keep 100% of fees — no pool takes a cut. In pool mining, the fee revenue is also split among all pool members.
🏆 Miner Block History — 4 Blocks Found
$3,642,952
Total USD value
45 days
Avg between finds
Jul 20, 2017 · 04:31 UTC · CKPool Solo
13.2935 BTC ≈ $898,375
Sep 11, 2017 · 09:01 UTC · CKPool Solo
13.0455 BTC ≈ $881,613
⏱ 53 days since previous find
#495,939THIS BLOCK
Nov 24, 2017 · 20:33 UTC · CKPool Solo
14.2312 BTC ≈ $961,748
⏱ 74 days since previous find
Dec 2, 2017 · 04:20 UTC · CKPool Solo
13.3355 BTC ≈ $901,216
⏱ 7 days since previous find
📊 At 1.6 PH/s hashrate, statistically expected to find a block every 12 years. Actual average: 45 days. 🍀 Running hot!