On the evening of Friday 30 May 2026, a Bitcoin miner small enough to sit beside a monitor found block 951771 and took the entire reward: 3.1404 BTC, worth roughly $232,000 that day. The machine was a Canaan Avalon Nano 3S running 6.68 terahash per second, pointed at the Braiins solo pool. It cost about $300. The odds against it finding that particular block were close to 149 million to one (Bitcoin.com News, block on mempool.space).
One block, one machine
The block landed at 4:27:23 p.m. Eastern. Its reward came in two parts: the 3.125 BTC subsidy the network pays whoever seals a block, plus about 0.0154 BTC in transaction fees from the people whose payments were waiting in it.
What makes the story unusual is not the amount. Blocks of that size are found around 144 times a day. It is that the whole thing went to one person.
Most miners join a pool. Thousands of machines combine their hashrate, the pool wins blocks regularly, and the reward is split into small steady payments sized to what each machine contributed. Solo mining is the other road. Your machine works alone. It either seals a block and keeps all of it, or it earns nothing at all. The Nano 3S in this story had been earning nothing at all, which is the normal state of affairs, right up until it earned $232,000.
The math behind the win
At the end of May the Bitcoin network was running at roughly 1,000 exahash per second. That is a billion terahash. A single machine contributing 6.68 terahash was therefore holding about one part in 150 million of the world's mining power.
Each block is an independent draw. Winning one at that share is a 149 million to one shot, every time. With 144 draws a day the expected wait works out at somewhere near 2,800 years.
So the win was not skill, and it was not a better machine. The owner was holding a very small number of tickets in a draw that runs every ten minutes, and one of them came up.
It happened again six weeks later
If the Nano 3S were the only case, it would be a curiosity. It was not. In mid July a single Bitaxe Gamma, an open source board in the $150 class running under one terahash, sealed block 957382 and collected a reward of its own (Cointelegraph). That machine was holding roughly one seven hundredth of the hashrate the Nano 3S had.
Home scale wins of this kind now turn up every few weeks somewhere in the world. They stay rare, and that is the point of them.
Better odds than Powerball, and 144 draws a day
The comparison people reach for is the lottery, and for once it holds up under arithmetic.
| Ticket | Odds per draw | Draws |
|---|---|---|
| Powerball jackpot | 1 in 292,201,338 | 3 a week |
| Mega Millions jackpot | 1 in 290,472,336 | 2 a week |
| A 6 TH/s desk miner | about 1 in 149,000,000 | 144 a day |
Per draw, a small desk miner carries better odds than either jackpot. It also enters roughly 52,000 draws a year rather than a few hundred, and the ticket does not expire when it loses. Both of those are true, and so is the other half: the odds remain long enough that nobody should buy one of these expecting to be the story.
What it takes to hold a ticket
This is the part where we have an interest, so here it is plainly. We sell machines that do what the one in this story did.
The Nano 3S that won was a 6.68 terahash box. The closest thing on our shelf is the Hammer BC04, 6 terahash for $239, in stock and shipping now. Same class of machine as the one that found block 951771, for less than it cost.
The other way to play it is more tickets. The Magic Miner 40T runs 40 terahash for $799, which is about 6.7 times the hashrate of the machine in this story and the cheapest terahash we sell at roughly $20 each.
Here is what each one actually buys you, on the same basis we publish on every product page.
| Machine | Hashrate | Price | Odds of a block in a year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hammer BC04 | 6 TH/s | $239 | about 1 in 2,894 |
| Magic Miner 40T | 40 TH/s | $799 | about 1 in 434 |
Read those two numbers properly. One in 434 is far better than one in 2,894, and it is still a long shot. Neither machine is an investment and we will not describe them as one.
Read this before you buy
- Solo mining pays in whole blocks or it pays nothing. There is no middle outcome.
- The odds above are published on each product page and they are the real ones. We do not round them in our favour.
- Electricity is the running cost. A desk miner of this size adds well under a dollar a day at average US rates.
- Bitcoin difficulty and price both move, and both change what any of this is worth.
- Most people who buy one of these will never find a block. Our own customers say so on the record.
If you want to hear from the people who run these machines anyway, we asked them, and they were blunter about the odds than any advertisement would be: the lottery ticket that never expires.
