On the last night of May 2026, a miner the size of a paperback, sitting in someone's home, found Bitcoin block 951,771 and collected the whole reward: 3.1404 BTC, about $232,000 at the time (Bitcoin.com News, the block on mempool.space). The machine was an Avalon Nano 3S running 6.68 terahash. Its odds on that block were about one in 149 million. Six weeks later a single Bitaxe Gamma, a $150 class board running under one terahash, did it again with block 957,382 (Cointelegraph). This article is about why thousands of people keep one of these running on a shelf, knowing they will probably never win.
The lottery you did not know existed
Here is the mechanic in plain words. Roughly every ten minutes the Bitcoin network holds a draw. Every miner on earth is holding tickets, from the warehouses in Texas to the little boxes on people's desks, and the number of tickets you hold is your hashrate. Win the draw and you win the entire block: 3.125 BTC plus fees, a bit over $260,000 at the end of September 2026. Most miners join pools and split their winnings into tiny steady drips. A quiet subculture has chosen the other way: solo mining. No pool, no splitting. Your box either wins the whole block or it wins nothing.
Which makes a small solo miner exactly one thing: a lottery ticket. Except this one plugs into the wall and enters every single draw, every ten minutes, for as long as it is on.
“Every lottery ticket costs a few bucks. But after you buy this and run it, you're buying a lottery ticket every few minutes, for every block.”
HeliumDeploy customer, first time buyer, recorded research interview
The odds, honestly
Now the part most ads skip. The odds are terrible. For the Nano 3S that won in May, Bitcoin.com put it at about one in 148.9 million per block, about one in a million per day, an expected wait of roughly 2,800 years (Bitcoin.com News). Powerball's jackpot is one in 292 million (Powerball) and Mega Millions is one in 290 million (Mega Millions). So a six terahash box has better odds per draw than a lottery ticket, and it gets 144 draws a day instead of two a week. It still needs decades of luck. Both things are true.
| Ticket | Odds per draw | Draws | Lifetime |
|---|---|---|---|
| Powerball ticket | 1 in 292,201,338 | 2 draws a week | expires when it loses |
| Mega Millions ticket | 1 in 290,472,336 | 2 draws a week | expires when it loses |
| 6 TH/s miner, solo | about 1 in 149 million | about 144 draws a day | never expires while it runs |
Our own customers say this unprompted. One of them owns four machines: “The potential return is basically zero.” Another, in the same breath as his dream of waking up to a block: “It brings me ten to fifteen dollars a year.” We show the math because a first time buyer told us it was the thing that convinced him:
“Even a real lottery ticket doesn't tell you the odds of winning. Here, I can see it.”
HeliumDeploy customer, first time buyer, recorded research interview
The people playing it
We run recorded research interviews with our customers. They are paid for their time and they can say whatever they want. Ask them why they run these little machines and almost nobody talks about profit. They talk like lottery players, unusually honest ones.
“I'm a complete noob still at this. I don't play the California lottery, but I figured this has a better chance.”
HeliumDeploy customer, California. Four miners on a shelf in his garage, solo to his own node: “If I'm putting in all the risk, I get all the rewards.”
“It's a lottery. I know that. But maybe once in my life, I will wake up and see I have hit one Bitcoin block by myself. That's the reason.”
HeliumDeploy customer, Netherlands, two years in
The Nano 3S. Six terahash, 140 watts, and one full block on May 31, 2026.
Somebody actually wins
What keeps this from being a fairy tale is that the winners are real and documented on chain. Trackers that list every block found by a solo pool count about twenty in the last twelve months, roughly one every sixteen days (solochance). Cointelegraph counted 24 in the year to July 2026, 75.4 BTC in total, up 41 percent on the year before (Cointelegraph). Most of those blocks came from hashrate the size of a small farm, or rented for a week. A few came from a single box on a desk: the Nano 3S in May, the Bitaxe Gamma in July, and in October 2025 a home cluster of six NerdQaxe units and one Avalon Q whose owner posted the block on Reddit (r/Bitcoin, and our write up).
We keep the full list, with the machine and hashrate for every hit, in Every solo Bitcoin block found from home in 2026, and the winners' own words in Solo block winners in their own words.
What the ticket costs to keep
A scratch ticket costs a few dollars and dies the moment it loses. This ticket costs electricity. The Nano 3S draws 140 watts, which is 3.36 kilowatt hours a day, about 62 cents at the July 2026 US average residential rate of 18.31 cents (EIA). The smallest ticket we sell, the Solo Lite, draws 23 watts, about a dime a day. We worked the whole bill out, state by state and province by province, in What a desk Bitcoin miner adds to your power bill.
The ticket
The entry ticket is any small solo capable miner. Plug it in, point it at a solo pool or your own node, and it is in every draw from then on. It will probably never pay you back, our own customers say so. And roughly every couple of weeks, somewhere in the world, one of these things wins anyway. As the four miner guy put it: “If you don't try, you don't have a chance.”
Read this before you buy
- The odds on the product page are real. Expected waits are measured in centuries.
- Solo means all or nothing. A pool pays small steady amounts instead; you choose.
- Solo pools warn that under 100 GH/s is unrealistic (solo.ckpool.org). Every unit here is well above that.
- Customer quotes come from our recorded research interviews, lightly edited and shared without names.
