Finding a block with a Bitaxe: what are the odds, really?

In January 2023, a solo miner on solo.ckpool found a valid Bitcoin block – with roughly 10 TH/s. That is less hash rate than a single NerdOctaxe delivers today. The reward, 6.25 BTC worth a good 130,000 US dollars at the time, went entirely to that one miner. No data centre, no warehouse full of machines – a setup that fits on a bookshelf.

Hits like that are rare, but they are documented and they keep happening. And they raise the question that everyone with a Bitaxe on their desk asks sooner or later: how likely is it that my device, of all things, finds a block?

The good news: this question has an exact answer. The mathematics behind it is not secret knowledge but simple proportionality. We will work through it here once, completely – for every device, with honest numbers and without the usual exaggerations in either direction.

The math is simpler than you think

At its core, Bitcoin mining is a fair raffle. All miners in the world compute hashes non-stop, and roughly every ten minutes one of them "wins" the right to write the next block. How much computing power you contribute determines your winning chance exactly: your share of the global hash rate is your share of the tickets. There are no hidden factors and no preference for big farms – a hash is a hash, whether it comes from a container in Texas or from your living room.

The global hash rate currently sits at around 1,000 EH/s – one zettahash per second, a one followed by 21 zeros. Your Bitaxe Gamma contributes about 1.3 TH/s of that. This works out to a share of roughly 0.00000013 percent. That is the probability that your device finds the next block – fresh with every block, around the clock.

Because the network produces about 144 blocks per day – 52,560 per year – these tiny individual chances add up to a yearly figure you can actually work with. For the Gamma it lands at roughly 1 in 15,000 per year.

In short:

At 1,000 EH/s of network hash rate, the rule of thumb is: chance per year ≈ 1 in (19,000 divided by your hash rate in TH/s). A device with 4.8 TH/s is therefore at about 1 in 4,000 per year, one with 12 TH/s at about 1 in 1,600.

The odds for every device at a glance

With this formula the entire model range can be worked out. All figures are rounded and refer to summer 2026 – the network hash rate keeps growing, so the numbers slowly get worse. It does not change the orders of magnitude.

Two things stand out. First: the odds scale exactly linearly. Double the hash rate means double the winning chance, with no thresholds and no minimum stake. Second: even the biggest device remains a lottery ticket. Even a NerdOctaxe Hydro needs, on statistical average, well over a thousand years until a hit. If you are planning around "when" instead of "if", you are planning wrong.

Better than the lottery? The honest comparison

The jackpot odds of the big European lotteries sit at roughly 1 in 140 million per ticket. A single "draw" of your Gamma – one block – is well below that at 1 in 770 million. Sounds sobering. The decisive difference: the lottery draws twice a week. Bitcoin draws every ten minutes, 52,560 times a year – and your miner automatically plays every single draw.

Over a year, the picture therefore flips completely. The Gamma's 1 in 15,000 corresponds to almost 10,000 lottery tickets on the jackpot. Those tickets would cost well over 10,000 euros. For the same winning chance, the Gamma draws about 130 kWh of electricity per year – around 40 euros at 30 cents per kilowatt hour. Per euro spent, mining buys you many times more tickets.

The comparison still is not entirely fair – in both directions. The lottery also pays out small prizes; with solo mining it is all or nothing. In return, you end up with hardware on your desk that keeps its value, makes you part of the Bitcoin network and shows you how mining actually works along the way. No lottery ticket can do that.

Why your Bitaxe is never "due"

Perhaps the most important property of this lottery: it has no memory. Every single hash is an independent attempt. A device that has run for five years straight is not one bit closer to the next block than one fresh out of the box. There is no saving up, no warming up and no invisible progress bar.

This is exactly where one value in AxeOS is often misread: Best Difficulty. It shows the hardest share your miner has found since the last restart – and it looks temptingly like progress. It is not. Best Difficulty is pure hindsight, a personal record like the longest throw at a throwing contest. The next hash knows nothing about it. What the AxeOS readings mean in detail is covered in our article on the AxeOS dashboard.

That sounds frustrating at first, but it has a beautiful flip side: your very first day has exactly the same chance as day 3,000. The 10 TH/s hit of 2023 did not come after a "long run-up" either. It came, like every hit in this lottery, out of nowhere.

What happens if you actually find a block?

Suppose the one hash lands. Your miner produces a hash below the current target, the finished block is announced to the network immediately – and its first transaction, the coinbase transaction, contains the reward and the recipient address. Currently that is 3.125 BTC of block subsidy plus the block's transaction fees; this stays unchanged until the next halving in 2028.

Where the money goes depends on your setup. With a solo pool like solo.ckpool, the reward minus a 2 percent fee goes to the address you entered as your username. With your own node and Public Pool on Umbrel, the block belongs to you entirely – the coinbase pays out to your own address, no detour, no deduction.

Two details worth knowing: freshly mined coins only become spendable after 100 confirmations, so after about 17 hours – a protocol rule that applies to all miners. And in rare cases a block can be "orphaned" if a competing block is found almost simultaneously and its chain wins out. Neither changes the essence: the hit is public, verifiable and part of the blockchain forever – with your address in the first line.

The math without the luck: expected value

You can also run the same calculation completely soberly. 3.125 BTC divided by 15,000 years of average waiting time gives the Gamma an expected value of a good 21,000 satoshis per year. At a price of 100,000 euros that would be just over 20 euros – with the roughly 40 euros of electricity on the other side. How the power costs break down in detail is covered in our article on Bitaxe power consumption.

Important to understand: a pool changes nothing about this expected value. It only smooths it. In a pool you receive the same expected amount of satoshis – in tiny, predictable portions instead of an all-or-nothing ticket. The difference between solo and pool is not a question of returns but of variance, in other words of your nerves. What speaks for which path is covered in our articles on solo mining and choosing a pool.

Which leads to the most honest sentence of this article: a Bitaxe is not an investment. If all you want is to stack satoshis, buying them directly is cheaper. A Bitaxe is a learning tool, a contribution to the decentralisation of the network – and a standing ticket for one of the rarest wins there is. In exactly that order.

How to actually improve your odds

There is exactly one lever: more hashes per second, over more time. Everything else is folklore. Concretely, that means:

• More hash rate per device: a NerdQaxe++ has almost four times the chance of a Gamma, a NerdOctaxe about nine times.
• Overclocking: 10 to 20 percent more clock is 10 to 20 percent more tickets. How to do it safely and under control is in our overclocking guide.
• Multiple devices: odds simply add up. Two Gammas equal one 2.6 TH/s setup.
• Uptime: every hour offline is an hour without tickets. Stable Wi-Fi and proper cooling pay directly into your probability.

What does not help

Switching pools "at the right moment", restarting after a high best share, mining only at night, or supposed lucky windows right after a found block: all of it useless, because every hash is independent of the previous one. A serious setup simply keeps running – chance does, or refuses to do, the rest.

Conclusion: a lottery where you run the draw yourself

The numbers are brutally honest: 1 in 770 million per block, roughly 1 in 15,000 per year for a Bitaxe Gamma, scaling linearly with every additional terahash. Nobody should buy a Bitaxe because they are counting on the block.

The real appeal sits one level deeper. You are not buying a ticket from some operator – you are helping run the draw itself. Your device checks transactions against your own rules, hashes in the same network as the biggest farms in the world, and every second it has the same fair chance per hash as they do. And should the one hash ever land, the block is yours – verifiable, forever.

The probability is tiny. But it is greater than zero, it is completely out in the open – and every ten minutes, the network rolls the dice again.

Hardware for your block lottery

Every device in our shop plays the lottery from the very first minute – the only difference is the number of tickets per second:

• Bitaxe Gamma – the entry point: quiet, efficient, ~1.3 TH/s
• NerdQaxe++ – about four times the odds at ~4.8 TH/s
• NerdOctaxe – about nine times the odds at ~12 TH/s
• All Bitcoin miners at a glance