Want to get into mining bitcoin, but don’t want to spend thousands of dollars and have insanely loud and hot hardware in your house? Like playing the lottery? Well Bitcoin Lottery Mining could be for you! Stop wasting your hard earned sats on lame lottery tickets and instead get way better chances of hitting the jackpot all while helping to secure the Bitcoin network!
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What Is Bitcoin Lottery Mining?
Bitcoin lottery mining (also called desktop mining) is a way for everyday people to mine Bitcoin that involves solo miners competing to find a valid block in the Bitcoin network. A solo miner is someone that doesn’t join a mining pool and instead, aims to independently solve a block all on their own and claim the full block reward for themselves.
Mining a solo block is hard. Like, really, really, really hard. To mine a single bitcoin block yourself, once a year on average, you would currently need 12,700 Terahash. To wield this amount of raw hashing power you’d need 54 Bitmain S21 Pro’s, each with a price tag of $6,318.
This would cost you a total of $341,172 up front, then you’d also have to somehow supply the enormous 190 kW of continuous power they suck up. Then you’d also need somewhere to put them, as they’re incredibly loud, and cool them as well.
Obviously this isn’t practical for everyday people, which is why most people that have relatively powerful Bitcoin miners like the S21 join a mining pool. Bitcoin lottery mining is for those who wish to operate even lower power consumption miners. As these are usually less than about 1 TH/s in power, they’re not worth even joining these pooled mining efforts.
As a result, people solo mine with them, essentially gambling on the odds of hitting a block and being able to claim the full block reward like you would a jackpot in Powerball.
How Bitcoin Mining Works
Mining is the process of adding transactions to the Bitcoin Blockchain. Proof-of-Work (PoW) mining also performs two other critical functions in the Bitcoin network:
- Secures the network from attackers
- Issues / mints new bitcoins in a fair, automatic and distributed way
While many think the idea of having a digital currency was the “breakthrough”, it’s arguably more the PoW, mining and difficulty adjustment ideas that combined to be the true utter genius invention.
Before Bitcoin there were a slew of digital, cryptographic based currency attempts that all failed. It wasn’t until the mining process, PoW and the difficulty adjustment mechanism was fully fleshed out and laid bare by Satoshi that the digital cryptocurrency industry was truly born.
That’s the elevator pitch on Bitcoin mining. If you’d like a much deeper explanation we have a 5,000 word tomb of information entitled What Is Bitcoin Mining? We also have a similarly deep explanation of Bitcoin Proof Of Work that has been reviewed by Adam Back, inventor of Proof of Work and cited author in the Bitcoin Whitepaper, for accuracy and correctness.
Bitcoin Miners: Is Solo Bitcoin Mining Profitable?
So now that you know what Bitcoin lottery mining is, the obvious question is can you profit from it? The answer is a firm no… unless you hit the jackpot that is! So, what are the odds of hitting that jackpot? A great resource to help understand this is Solo Chance. Simply enter in your hash rate and it’ll tell you what your odds are!
The example above is for a hash rate of 1 TH/s, which is what the new BitAxe Gamma that costs $165 USD is able to hit using just 15 Watts of power, which costs $13 per year @ $0.10c/kWh. Obviously the higher your hash rate, the better your chances of solo mining your own block and hitting the jackpot are. Maybe you by 10 BitAxe’s to increase your luck, just like someone might buy 10 lottery tickets instead of 1.
But make no mistake, the odds we’re talking about here are very slim! A 1 in 4,616,181 chance per day isn’t likely to happen any time soon. That being said they’re much better odds than winning the Powerball jackpot, which is 1 in 292 million and you only get those odds each time you buy a ticket, not every day.
The reward for mining a Bitcoin block is currently 3.25 BTC or around $200,000 USD. So Bitcoin lottery mining does net you less winnings ($200k vs millions), but the odds are much better! You can also buy two.. or three… or ten of them as said and increase your odds too. It’s like a lottery ticket you buy, that lasts years!
How To Improve Your Chances Of Hitting The Jackpot
The number one way to increase your chances of hitting a solo mined block reward is, like all mining efforts, to increase your hash rate. Either buy a faster miner, such as the S19 Pro++ (yes their names are atrocious), or in the case of lottery mining, buy more of the smaller miners.
Your chances increase with every extra Terahash you mine with and seeing as these smaller desktop miners don’t take up much power or space, they’re easy to stack up and just physically have more miners under your control. Be aware though that if you’re wanting to buy lots and lots of them, you might be better off just buying a single more powerful miner instead.
For example, that S19 Pro++ is equivalent to about 125 BitAxe Gamma’s and will get you far more hash rate for the same price. With that 125 TH/s you’d then have a 1 in 36,929 chance per day of hitting it big. It does use a lot more power though, so everything is a compromise and depends on your use case.
You can also optimize your mining setup by upgrading to newer firmware that unlocks faster mining and even overclock the miner, provided you ensure it’s properly cooled.
Bitcoin Mining Technology
Mining technology is constantly evolving, getting faster, more diverse and easier to use. The BitAxe Gammer is one of the latest variants of the Bitaxe project which we’re explicitly calling out as it’s fully open source! There’s also older, less efficient models such as the BitAxe Supra or Ultra with lower hashing power.
Other popular desktop or lottery miners include:
- AltairTech Urlacher – 56 TH/s at 1,200 Watts
- Heatbit Trio – 14 TH/s at 1,400 Watts
- Avalon Nano 3 – 4 TH/s at 140 Watts
- Braiins Mini Miner 100 – 1 TH/s at 40 Watts
- D-Central Bitaxe Max (1397) – 0.44 TH/s at 11 Watts
- Gekkoscience Compac A1 – 0.4 TH/s at 30 Watts
Regardless of how much money you have, how much power consumption you’re happy to provide, cooling capabilities and more there’s a miner out there for everyone. We think the BitAxe Gamma also fits very nicely in with being a “starter” miner as it’s not overly expensive, is simple to setup and even can connect via WiFi to make everything even easier and neater.
Other Reasons To Mine On The Bitcoin Network
While this article mainly focuses on the lottery aspect of desktop miners, this isn’t the only reason. With every miner, every Terahash, every user that joins the Bitcoin network and contributes, the network security of Bitcoin increases.
You’re helping to secure the network, decentralize the network and increase the hash rate all in one go. While you might never add blocks to the blockchain yourself and get the rewards for it, you still help the network and also get to learn more about how it fundamentally works.
From Bitcoin mining to the configuration of the miners to how a new block is chosen to mining templates, network difficulty and more desktop miners make for a fantastic at home learning experience both for adults and kids alike.
How To Solo Mine And Join The Bitcoin Lottery Mining Club
While not a full step-by-step process, let’s have a look at the main steps you’ll want to do if you feel like joining the Bitcoin mining lottery!
1. Purchase Mining Hardware
First, pick a reliable piece of mining hardware that suits your technical level and power profile. Purchase it from a reputable manufacturer and get it delivered. The Bitaxe “Gamma” Desktop ASIC Bitcoin Miner costs about $165 USD delivered from Altair or Crypto Cloaks.
2. Setup & Configuration
Find a suitable location for your new miner, somewhere that will stay mostly cool even during hot days and doesn’t have a lot of dust build up that can interfere with the electronics. Ensure power and networking to the miner is stable and won’t get accidentally turned off or unplugged for some reason.
Next ensure it’s operating on the latest firmware, setup the miner so that it’s connected to your own Full Bitcoin Node and then make sure you enable some type of monitoring or alert system. This is so that if it ever goes down, you’ll know about it and can fix it up. You can also sometimes set it up so that it will auto restart in case of power failure or other common issues like locking up.
Finally pick and join a solo mining pool with some excellent choices include ckpool or publicpool.
3. Start Mining!
Once you’ve configured your miner and joined your mining pool it should automatically start mining for you. Some other things to note as it mines away over the weeks and months is that you might want to keep track of things like its power consumption via a power meter, its hash rate or temperature.
Also note that if you do happen to hit the jackpot that mining rewards are typically considered taxable income.
FAQ
Is Bitcoin Mining Payout Real?
Yes. If you successfully mine a solo block or add your hash rate to a mining pool you will receive bitcoin as your reward. You can then either hold onto it or exchange it for any other fiat currency such as USD or EUR.
Is Solo Mining Worth It?
From a pure profitability point of view no. However lottery tickets, jackpots, quizes etc bring in more than $300 billion world wide each year, so clearly a lot of people enjoy “playing the odds” which is what solo mining is. Whether you do it with a small or large fleet of miners, you can get high rewards with much lower odds than the traditional lottery.
What Is The Best Solo Lottery Miner?
There is no single “best” solo lottery miner as everyone has different needs. Some solutions are more efficient than others, but have a much higher power consumption. Others are small and easy to use or work using just a USB cable, but won’t give you a very good probability of solo mining a block. AltairTech has a good list of most desktop miners to compare here.
What Are The Odds Of Mining A Bitcoin Solo?
Typically for a desktop miner that has around 1 TH/s you chance is about 1 in 4 million. The more hash rate you have, the higher your chance of solving a block is, but it’s still likely very rare. Compared to the actual lottery though these are quite good odds as wining something like the Powerball is about 1 in 292 million.
Are Bitcoin Lotteries Legal?
This is the wrong question. Bitcoin is not a company and there’s no CEO or product specifically to buy like a lottery ticket. To “enter” the Bitcoin lottery you simply just have to participate in solo mining, which means buying and running a bitcoin miner. Thus the correct question is, is Bitcoin mining legal? For most countries the answer is yes, but there are still a few countries that mining is illegal in such as Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.
