🎓 Explain Like I'm 10
Someone spent a small amount of money to rent mining power from NiceHash for a short time. They pointed it at the Bitcoin network solo, hoping to win the lottery.
On May 19, 2025, against enormous odds, they hit the jackpot — block #897,427 worth $218,270. The cost of renting that hashrate? A fraction of the reward.
🎲 The Odds — Show Your Work
Miner's share of total Bitcoin hashrate
0.028262%
Miner: 288.5 PH/s vs Network: 1020.75 EH/s
Miner hashrate (Estimated from block frequency (5 blocks found))
288.5 PH/s
Bitcoin network hashrate
1020.75 EH/s
Chance of winning each block
1 in 3,538
Expected wait time at this hashrate
25 days
Expected blocks to find 1 solo block
3,538 blocks
Probability per block = miner_hashrate / network_hashrate
= 288.5 PH/s / 1020.75 EH/s
= 1 in 3,538
Expected wait = blocks_to_win × 10 minutes
= 3,538 × 10 min = 25 days
⛏️ Miner Profile
Hashrate (24h)
288.5 PH/s (est. from 5 blocks)
Estimated from block frequency (5 blocks found)
Solo blocks found (tracked)
5 blocks
🏗️
Large mining farm
Thousands of ASICs, industrial power
🎯 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 1,971,479,318 was the winner.
01,971,479,318 ← winner4,294,967,295
1,971,479,318
Winning Nonce
2,323,487,977
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 — 3.1250 BTC (96.76%)
Fixed reward, halves every 4 years
Fees — 0.104795 BTC (3.24%)
From 3,511 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 — 5 Blocks Found
$1,077,619
Total USD value
26 days
Avg between finds
Feb 23, 2025 · 18:32 UTC · NiceHash EasyMining
3.2631 BTC ≈ $220,521
Apr 3, 2025 · 01:13 UTC · NiceHash EasyMining
3.1573 BTC ≈ $213,371
⏱ 38 days since previous find
Apr 8, 2025 · 01:02 UTC · NiceHash EasyMining
3.1338 BTC ≈ $211,781
⏱ 5 days since previous find
#897,427THIS BLOCK
May 19, 2025 · 15:47 UTC · NiceHash EasyMining
3.2298 BTC ≈ $218,270
⏱ 42 days since previous find
Jun 6, 2025 · 19:54 UTC · NiceHash EasyMining
3.1618 BTC ≈ $213,677
⏱ 18 days since previous find
📊 At 288.5 PH/s hashrate, statistically expected to find a block every 25 days. Actual average: 26 days. ✅ Right on track.