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On July 9, 2026, at roughly 03:30 UTC, a solo miner running a single Bitaxe Gamma device mined Bitcoin block #957382 and walked away with 3.1382 BTC, worth approximately $200,000 at the time. The hardware responsible for this windfall retails for around $150.
To put that return on investment in perspective: that’s roughly a 133,000% gain, achieved in about eight hours, on a device that draws between 15 and 21 watts of power and costs an estimated $1 to $2 per month to run.
## What actually happened
The Bitaxe Gamma is an open-source, Wi-Fi-enabled ASIC miner built around Bitmain’s BM1370 chip. It’s popular in hobbyist circles, the kind of device people set up on a bookshelf next to a router, not in an industrial warehouse next to thousands of identical machines.
This particular miner connected to Public Pool, a zero-fee solo mining pool that lets participants keep the entire block reward if they win. No pool cut, no shared payout. Winner takes all.
The Bitaxe Gamma operates at roughly 995 GH/s to 1 TH/s. The Bitcoin network’s total hashrate at the time of the win sat near 874 EH/s, with a mining difficulty around 133.9 trillion. In English: the network was about 874 billion times more powerful than this one device.
The statistical probability of a miner operating at 1 TH/s winning any given block is approximately 1 in 87 million. Actuarially, a device at that hashrate would be expected to mine a block once every few thousand years. This miner did it in a single sitting.
The total block reward of 3.1382 BTC includes both the block subsidy and transaction fees collected from the transactions bundled into that block. Because the miner was connected to Public Pool, not a traditional shared pool, every satoshi of that reward went directly to one person.
## This keeps happening in 2026
What’s notable is that this isn’t a one-off anomaly. Solo mining wins using affordable or unconventional hardware have become a recurring theme this year.
In February 2026, a miner using rented hashpower, an investment of roughly $75, also pulled in approximately $200,000 from a solo block win. In April, a separate miner connected to CKPool, another low-fee solo mining facilitator, claimed a reward worth around $210,000.
The Bitaxe project itself is open-source, meaning the hardware schematics and firmware are freely available. That accessibility has cultivated a community of small-scale miners who treat the activity more like a hobby than a business.
## What this means for Bitcoin’s mining landscape
Solo mining wins make for great headlines, but they also surface a more substantive conversation about mining centralization, one of the more persistent concerns in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
The vast majority of Bitcoin blocks are mined by large industrial operations, often concentrated in specific geographies and tied to institutional capital. When a single Bitaxe device wins a block, it’s a statistical outlier. But the broader trend of accessible mining platforms growing in participation is worth noting. More individual miners connecting to solo pools, even with tiny hashrates, incrementally diversifies who is participating in block production.
Centralization in mining creates practical risks around censorship resistance, regulatory pressure on concentrated mining entities, and the potential for coordinated behavior among a small group of dominant hashrate providers.
The expected value for a 1 TH/s miner is essentially zero on any reasonable time horizon, but the variance is enormous. That variance is precisely what attracts participants, and platforms like Public Pool are lowering the friction to participate.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
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