Solo Bitcoin Mining: A Lottery With Better Odds Than Powerball

Most people who buy Powerball tickets understand, on some level, that they are not going to win. The odds of a jackpot are roughly 1 in 292,201,338. The expected return is famously negative. People play anyway, because for the cost of $2, you get to spend the week imagining what you would do with the money.

There is a different lottery that almost no one in the general public knows about — one that uses real cryptography, real hardware, and offers genuinely better odds. It is called solo Bitcoin mining, and a small but growing community of hobbyists treats it as exactly what it is: an asymmetric bet with a very small but very real chance of changing your year.

This piece walks through how it works, the actual math compared to a state lottery, the hardware you would need, the costs you should understand, and what to honestly expect.

The setup, in one paragraph

When a Bitcoin miner finds a block, they receive the entire block reward — currently 3.125 BTC, plus all the transaction fees in that block. At Bitcoin's recent prices, that is roughly $300,000 to $400,000 per block. Industrial mining operations run thousands of high-end ASICs to maximize the probability of finding blocks. But the underlying lottery is open to anyone. You can buy a $200 USB miner, point it at a solo mining pool that gives you the full block reward if your hardware finds the winning hash, and you are in the running. The odds are tiny, but they are calculable, and they are much better than any state lottery.

The math, honestly

Bitcoin's network hash rate at present sits in the range of 700 exahashes per second (700 EH/s) — that's 700 quintillion hashes every second across all miners worldwide. A new block is found roughly every 10 minutes. Your odds of finding any given block are simply your hash rate divided by the total network hash rate.

Let's run the numbers for a few realistic hardware options:

Hardware	Hash rate	Odds per block	Annual odds (1 year of running)	vs Powerball
NerdMiner V2 (toy)	~50 KH/s	1 in 14 quadrillion	~1 in 270 billion	~1,000x worse
Bitaxe Ultra	~500 GH/s	1 in 1.4 quintillion	~1 in 26,600	~11,000x better
Bitaxe Gamma 601	~1.2 TH/s	1 in 583 quadrillion	~1 in 11,100	~26,000x better
Antminer S9 (used)	~14 TH/s	1 in 50 quadrillion	~1 in 950	~308,000x better
Antminer S19 (new)	~95 TH/s	1 in 7.4 quadrillion	~1 in 140	~2 million x better

A few observations from this table that matter:

• The cheapest hardware (NerdMiner) is genuinely worse than Powerball on a one-year basis. It is fun as a learning tool but is not actually a viable lottery.
• The Bitaxe family is where the lottery framing starts to make sense. A $200-$300 device running for a year gives you roughly 1-in-11,000 to 1-in-27,000 odds of winning $300,000+ in Bitcoin.
• Used industrial hardware moves the odds dramatically. A used Antminer S9 (often $100-$200) running for a year produces meaningfully better odds, though it consumes far more electricity.
• New industrial hardware changes the calculation entirely — at 1-in-140, you are no longer playing the lottery, you are starting a business with negative expected value before electricity and positive expected value (probably) if you have cheap power.

Why this lottery has better odds than a state lottery

This is the part that surprises most people. State lotteries are designed to be terrible bets. The expected return on a Powerball ticket is roughly 50 cents on the dollar — half of every ticket purchase goes to the state, prize structures favor smaller payouts, and the jackpot odds are made deliberately astronomical to keep jackpots growing.

Solo Bitcoin mining is different in three important ways:

1. The "lottery" mechanism is purely cryptographic. No one is taking a cut. The same probability function applies to you as to a billion-dollar mining company. If your hash hits, you win the full block reward.
2. The hardware retains residual value. A Powerball ticket is worth nothing after the drawing. A Bitaxe or used ASIC, even if you never hit a block, is still hardware you can sell or repurpose.
3. You can play indefinitely. Buy a ticket once, plug in the miner, and your odds compound across every block found over the lifetime of the hardware. There is no "draw date" you have to keep buying for.

Of course, this comes with caveats that the lottery does not have — primarily electricity costs and hardware obsolescence. We'll get to those.

The hardware actually used today

The solo mining hobby has produced a fascinating ecosystem of hardware. The pieces below are the ones most people buy.

Bitaxe Ultra / Gamma — the dominant choice

The Bitaxe family of open-source Bitcoin miners has become the standard hobbyist solo miner. Designed by community contributors and produced by several different manufacturers, each Bitaxe uses a single ASIC chip removed from a Bitmain Antminer S19 or S21. The Bitaxe Ultra delivers roughly 500 GH/s; the newer Bitaxe Gamma 601 hits ~1.2 TH/s. Power consumption is in the 12-18 watt range — meaning you can run one off a phone charger and electricity costs are in the order of $1-2 per month.

Sound: minimal (small fan). Heat: modest. Setup: connect to WiFi, point at a solo mining pool, walk away.

NerdMiner — the educational toy

The NerdMiner is built around an ESP32 microcontroller and produces only about 50 kilohashes per second. As shown in the table above, the odds of actually finding a block with one are vanishingly small. But it is genuinely educational — you can see exactly how mining works at a small scale, and the device is cheap, quiet, and fun to set up. Treat it as a desk toy, not a lottery.

Used Antminer S9 — the high-odds budget option

The Antminer S9 was the workhorse miner of 2017-2019. They are now sold on the secondary market for $50-$200, depending on condition. At 14 TH/s they offer dramatically better lottery odds than a Bitaxe — but they consume 1,300+ watts, run hot, and produce serious noise. They are not apartment-friendly. A garage or shed with cheap power is the natural setting.

Honest expected value at typical US residential electricity rates ($0.12/kWh): negative. You will spend roughly $130 a month on electricity for an asset that may or may not produce $300k+ once a year. Treat the electricity as the cost of buying lottery tickets.

The accessories that matter

If you are going to run a miner of any size, you need a few things you might not have thought about:

• A reliable power supply. Cheap PSUs fail under sustained load. Server-grade PSUs are standard for ASICs.
• Cooling. Larger miners need active cooling and ventilation. Smaller Bitaxe-class devices are fine with stock fans.
• An uninterruptible power supply if you live somewhere with frequent power blips, so the miner stays online.
• Ethernet, ideally. WiFi works on the small miners but a wired connection is more reliable.

Actual solo miner wins, by the way

This is not theoretical. Solo miners genuinely have hit blocks. The Bitcoin community keeps a loose tally of notable solo wins. A handful in recent years stand out:

• A solo miner using approximately 13 TH/s of hash rate hit a block in 2024, taking home the full reward.
• Multiple Bitaxe-class miners (small consumer hardware) have found blocks in the past two years. Each of these was statistically improbable but happened.
• A small-scale miner using an older S9-class machine won a block in 2022, sparking a wave of new interest in the hobby.

The point is not that wins are common — they are not. The point is that they are possible, and they happen often enough that the community has documented dozens of them.

How to actually set one up

Assuming you have hardware in hand, the actual setup is straightforward.

1. Choose a solo mining pool. Despite the name, a "solo mining pool" is the right choice — it handles the work of submitting your blocks to the Bitcoin network in exchange for keeping the full reward if your hardware happens to find one. Two popular options are Solo CKPool (run by community-known operator Con Kolivas) and Public Pool. Both are free and require nothing more than entering your Bitcoin address.
2. Get a Bitcoin address. Use a wallet you control — ideally a hardware wallet. The mining pool will pay your block reward directly to this address if you win.
3. Configure your miner. Each device has a web interface where you enter the pool's stratum URL and your Bitcoin address. Bitaxe devices have a particularly user-friendly setup.
4. Plug it in and forget. The miner will run continuously, attempting hashes. Its dashboard will show your current hash rate and the share of the network you represent.

That's it. The waiting begins. Most participants run their hardware for months or years without hitting a block. Some hit one in the first week. The probability distribution is what it is.

What to honestly expect

The honest expected value of small-scale solo mining is negative. Over a year of running a Bitaxe Gamma, you will:

• Pay roughly $15-25 in electricity (at 15W and US residential rates).
• Have a roughly 1-in-11,000 chance of hitting a block worth $300k+.
• Expected value of that bet: roughly $27 of expected winnings against $20 of electricity. Net expected value: ~$7 positive, before the cost of the hardware itself.

So the hardware investment is real and matters. A $250 Bitaxe with $20/year electricity needs to last 30+ years on expected value alone to "pay back," ignoring time value of money. That is obviously not the right way to think about it.

The right way to think about it: this is a lottery ticket that lasts as long as the hardware lasts and that retains residual value. If you are going to spend $200-300 on a "fun bet" with a non-zero chance of a life-changing payout, the math here is meaningfully better than spending the same amount on Powerball tickets over a year.

Tax implications if you win

If you hit a block, that is a taxable event in most jurisdictions. In the United States, the IRS treats mined cryptocurrency as ordinary income at the fair market value at the time you receive it. So if you mine a block worth $300,000, you owe ordinary income tax on $300,000 in the year you receive it — regardless of whether you sell or hold.

This matters because you will owe the tax in dollars, but the asset may have moved significantly by the time the tax is due. Plan accordingly: setting aside the dollar value of taxes owed in fiat (or stablecoins) is the conservative move.

The intangible side

Beyond the lottery framing, there is something genuinely interesting about running a Bitcoin miner. You are participating directly in the security of the network. You are observing the same cryptography that secures hundreds of billions of dollars in value, running on hardware you can touch. You can read every line of code your miner runs (it is open source). For people who find this kind of thing intellectually satisfying, it is a hobby that scratches that itch in a way that buying ETF shares does not.

The lottery framing is honest about the realistic outcome. But for many people who get into solo mining, the lottery is incidental to the hobby itself.

The bottom line

Solo Bitcoin mining as a lottery is a real thing, with real math that favors it over state lotteries by orders of magnitude. The expected value is roughly break-even for hobbyist-scale hardware, the residual hardware value protects against total loss, and the upside in the rare event of a block win is genuinely life-changing.

Treat it as a hobby with lottery characteristics, not as an investment. Buy hardware you can afford to view as fun money. Set realistic expectations — you will probably never find a block. But unlike Powerball, the math says you might.