An Ethereum miner hits the jackpot with $540,000 in block rewards

An ethereum miner has made it big by mining a block himself and earning rewards worth around $540,000.

Operating through the 2miners Ethereum SOLO mining pool on January 17, the miner mined a full block and was awarded 168 ETH. According to BitInfoCharts, this reward significantly exceeds the average reward of about 4 ETH per block.

The salient nature of the reward is the size and computing power of the SOLO pool. It is relatively small, with 854 miners online, and at the time of writing, 1.5Tera hashes per second, which means the average miner contributes 1.85Giga hashes per second. This lucky miner currently contributes 2.25Giga hashes per second, which can be produced between 1 and 20 of the latest GPU devices.

Hashrate is the amount of computer processing power a device contributes to proof-of-work blockchains such as Ethereum and Bitcoin. More hashrate helps keep the network secure by processing transactions and mining blocks.

A lucky jackpot on the ethereum network marks the third time in two weeks that an individual cryptocurrency miner has hit the jackpot. On Jan. 11, a Bitcoin (BTC) miner from Solo CK anonymous personal mining dug a full block himself, earning 6.25 BTC.

Two days later, another independent miner using solo CK again mines a new Bitcoin block with one to three devices.

Each miner has a 1 in 140,000 chance of digging an entire block, and the chance of two small miners accomplishing the same feat in the same week is estimated to be one in billion.

Since reaching an all-time high of $0.282 on May 12, 2021, Ethereum’s average daily profitability has been declining. According to BitInfoCharts, the current average profit margin is around $0.0474. This is partly due to EIP-1559, which is burned rather than distributed to miners.

Jackpot rewards like the one earlier this week may be a thing of the past when the ethereum network completes its "merge." The “merger” refers to its shift to a “Proof of Stake” (POS) consensus algorithm. With POS, the stability of the network is maintained by staking tokens. This will reduce the power resource requirements of the network.