Lucky ETH Miner Receives a Block Reward Worth $540K

ETH

An individual Ethereum miner who mined a full block hit the jackpot by receiving 170 ETH for their efforts. Converted into USD value, the reward is equivalent to nearly $540,000 (calculated at the time 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 at today’s prices, the amount of cryptocurrency amounts to approximately $480,000, while at the time of mining, the value in USD was equivalent to $540,000. The reward significantly exceeds the average block reward of around 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 odds of this happening have been estimated at just 0.000073%. The event happened at the Solo CK pool, when the reward was worth over $267,000 (based on the current price of bitcoin at the time).

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.

Mining with proof of work should be banned

The two hegemons of the cryptocurrency universe – Bitcoin and Ether – currently rely on proof-of-work consensus mining. However, this model has caused a lot of controversy lately, as many experts claim that 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 should be noted that Ethereum is in the process of upgrading the network to Ethereum 2.0 as the transition is expected to take place this summer. After development, Vitalik Buterin’s cryptocurrency protocol will start using the proof-of-stake method and thus become more eco-focused.

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