Lucky ETH Miner Receives a Block Reward Worth $540K

Original author: Dimitar Dzhondzhorov

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An individual Ethereum miner who mined a complete block hit the jackpot by receiving 170 ETH for his efforts. Converted in USD value, the reward equals nearly $540,000 (calculated by the time when the block reward was mined).

Beating the Odds

Despite some people claiming that Ethereum mining (still being proof-of-work) is harmful to the environment, the process is still thriving, and even single individuals are constantly trying their luck to mine blocks on their own.

One such example defied the odds earlier this week and earned 170 ETH for mining an entire block. Calculated in today’s prices, the cryptocurrency amount totals approximately $480,000, while at the time of the mining, the USD value equaled $540,000. The reward significantly surpasses the per-block average reward of about 4 ETH.

The individual miner was operating through the 2Miners: Solo pool. The latter is a relatively small organization, consisting of 854 miners online and 1.5 terahashes per second, meaning that the average miner contributes 1.85 gigahashes per second (GH/s).

Earlier this month, a solo bitcoin miner beat 1 in 10,000 odds and received a block reward of 6.25 BTC. Interestingly, the chances of this happening were estimated at a mere 0.000073%. The event occurred at the Solo CK pool, while the reward was worth over $267,000 (going by the current price of bitcoin back then).

Even though the chances are extremely rare, the same thing happened one day later when another individual miner pocketed the 6.25 BTC block reward. With just 116 TH/s, they were lucky enough to win the mining race and get approximately $270K worth of the primary digital asset.

Proof-of-Work Mining Should Be Prohibited

The two hegemons in the cryptocurrency universe – Bitcoin and Ether – currently rely on the proof-of-work mining consensus. However, this model has caused much controversy lately as many experts claim it poses major risks to the environment.

A few days ago, Erik Thedéen – the vice-chair of the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) – joined this club. In his view, EU financial regulators should ban the proof-of-work mining methodology and encourage the proof-of-stake model, which is less energy-intensive.

It is worth noting that Ethereum is on its way to upgrading the network to Ethereum 2.0 as the transition should occur this summer. Following the development, Vitalik Buterin’s cryptocurrency protocol will start utilizing the proof-of-stake method and thus become more green-focused.