Re: Lottery mining: a cost-benefit analysis
by on 10/12/2025, 10:10:29 UTC
That's finding a block once every 227 years on average.
If more people would do the math on lotteries, they wouldn't play at all. Imagine: "if you play monthly, you'll win on average once every 10 million years". LolWith "just" 7 million people across the world, or less than 0.1% of the population, having a Bitaxe running in their house, we would expect lottery miners to find block every day.
Have a look at the solo mining pool payouts: the transaction mined 0.06304371 BTC to bc1q28kkr5hk4gnqe3evma6runjrd2pvqyp8fpwfzu. Google brings me to pool.nerdminers.org (although I don't see that address on the site). It shows 2000+ users with a hashrate under 2 GH/s. I can't make sense out of this. But on-chain, the same address received similar mining payments 3 times this month, 2 times in September, 1 time in August and 3 times in July. That's 9 blocks in (almost) half a year, or one block every 20 days. That puts it at the equivalent of about 350,000 people running a lottery miner. In reality, I assume it's less people and some of them have much higher hashrates.