🎓 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 Jan 6, 2026, against enormous odds, they hit the jackpot — block #931,081 worth $211,512. The cost of renting that hashrate? A fraction of the reward.
🎲 The Odds — Show Your Work
Miner's share of total Bitcoin hashrate
0.007220%
Miner: 73.7 PH/s vs Network: 1020.75 EH/s
Miner hashrate (Estimated from block frequency (4 blocks found))
73.7 PH/s
Bitcoin network hashrate
1020.75 EH/s
Chance of winning each block
1 in 13,851
Expected wait time at this hashrate
96 days
Expected blocks to find 1 solo block
13,851 blocks
Probability per block = miner_hashrate / network_hashrate
= 73.7 PH/s / 1020.75 EH/s
= 1 in 13,851
Expected wait = blocks_to_win × 10 minutes
= 13,851 × 10 min = 3.2 months
⛏️ Miner Profile
Hashrate (24h)
73.7 PH/s (est. from 4 blocks)
Estimated from block frequency (4 blocks found)
Solo blocks found (tracked)
4 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 2,942,111,675 was the winner.
02,942,111,675 ← winner4,294,967,295
2,942,111,675
Winning Nonce
1,352,855,620
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 (99.85%)
Fixed reward, halves every 4 years
Fees — 0.004805 BTC (0.15%)
From 735 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
113 days
Avg between finds
Mar 4, 2025 · 18:28 UTC · NiceHash EasyMining
3.2007 BTC ≈ $216,300
May 7, 2025 · 05:07 UTC · NiceHash EasyMining
3.1439 BTC ≈ $212,466
⏱ 63 days since previous find
#931,081THIS BLOCK
Jan 6, 2026 · 01:41 UTC · NiceHash EasyMining
3.1298 BTC ≈ $211,512
⏱ 244 days since previous find
Feb 7, 2026 · 14:39 UTC · NiceHash EasyMining
3.1496 BTC ≈ $212,852
⏱ 33 days since previous find
📊 At 73.7 PH/s hashrate, statistically expected to find a block every 96 days. Actual average: 113 days. 😤 Unlucky so far.