Ocean Mining reports that the application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) NerdMiner, which costs around $500, was able to hum and hit blocks at about 5 terahashes per second (TH/s).
Datum-driven baby nald miners stun network by breaking 960 EH/s odds
On social media, people have been discussing how small miners hit blocks through the solo ocean mining setup and the datum (a decentralized alternative template for universal mining) protocol.
This system connects mining hardware to the Bitcoin full node. In this case, Start9Labs Infrastructure – allows direct block submission and procedure without Midleman’s supervision.
In X, marine mining was posted:
Block 913272 was discovered yesterday by a small miner. @snednode revealed that it was him. It is why we do this by seeing miners of all sizes mining their blocks and hearing their voices by generating decentralization in real time.
The NerdMiner Qaxe++ works at around 4.8 Terahash (Th/s) per second, drawing about 72-76 watts from the wall. The S21 Pro uses the same semiconductors found in Bitmain’s Antminer S21 Pro series, although it is about 229 Th/s more than the Qaxe++.
The vice president of Ocean Mining Development and Engineering reported that the miners have revealed that it is a Qaxe++ miner.
When combined with a pool, this hashrate can generate a profit of around $0.26 per day with an operating cost of about 0.04 per kilowatt-hour (kWh). Still, many pools implement strict minimum hashrate thresholds and push small miners into pools that do not set such requirements.
Pools such as Ocean and Solo Ckpool do not impose a formal minimum hashrate to participate. It’s also specifically built for miners looking to go solo, but so is the pool hash. Still, at very low hashrates (less than 100 GH/s or 0.1 Th/s), the chances of finding blocks will effectively be zero at these levels.
And even the fifth second is very difficult. To put the odds in view, the global Bitcoin network hashrate stood about per 960 seconds (EH/S) when block 913272 was discovered. The fifth NERDMINER worker represents just 0.000000052% of that total. At the current difficulty level of 136.04 trillion, an estimate of approximately 5.84 x 10²³ is required to find a valid block.
With 5 trillion estimates per second, it takes about three to seven hundred years of miners to find a block on average. Statistically, the chances of hitting one block in a year are about one in 3,700. It’s nearly 1 in 1.35 million people in one day.
But contrary to all these astronomical odds, this baby asic device has been lucky enough to find a golden hash. Solo mining at a low hashrate is like playing lottery tickets with quantum dice, but sometimes even the smallest players can hit the jackpot. Meanwhile, the initial purchase of Electric Opex and $500 allowed the lucky miner to win 3.134 BTC for $347,968 today.
This is not the first example of such outrageous luck. In July 2024, the developer of Solo Ckpool, known as Dr-CK, shared that another baby minor, the third Bitaxe, was able to hit the 290th solo block in the pool. “This hashrate is just a chance to find an average of once every 3,500 years, or once every 1.2 million people per day,” explained Solo Ckpool Dev at the time.
