Here's a question we get asked constantly: "If I buy a little solo miner for $100, is there actually any chance it finds a Bitcoin block?" The honest answer is yes — but the odds are so astronomically small that you need to understand exactly what you're signing up for before you plug one in. So let's do the maths live, step by step, with no hand-waving.
By the end of this post, you'll know precisely how unlikely it is, why the comparison to a lottery ticket is more accurate than most people realise, and — perhaps surprisingly — why thousands of miners around the world still choose to do it anyway.
The Setup: What Does a $100 Solo Miner Actually Do?
When we talk about a $100 solo miner, we're talking about devices like the Lucky Miner LV06 at 500 GH/s, the Bitaxe Gamma 602 at roughly 1.2–1.8 TH/s, or similar compact open-source miners. These are tiny single-chip ASIC devices that sit on your desk, draw 5–15 watts, connect over Wi-Fi, and independently try to solve a Bitcoin block — no pool, no shared rewards, just you against the entire network.
If your miner finds a valid block, you get the entire block reward: currently 3.125 BTC. At today's prices, that's a life-changing sum. If it doesn't find a block — which is overwhelmingly the most likely outcome on any given day, week, month, or year — you get exactly zero. There's no partial credit in solo mining.
That's fundamentally different from pool mining, where you contribute hashrate to a group and receive small, regular payouts proportional to your contribution. Solo mining is binary: everything or nothing.
Step 1: Understanding the Network Hashrate
To calculate your odds, you first need to know how much total hashrate is competing to find each block. The Bitcoin network hashrate fluctuates, but as of mid-2026, it hovers around 800–900 exahashes per second (EH/s). Let's use 850 EH/s as a working figure.
An exahash is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 hashes — that's 10 to the power of 18. Written out in terahashes, 850 EH/s is 850,000,000 TH/s. That's the combined firepower of every mining operation on the planet: industrial warehouses in Texas, hydroelectric farms in Paraguay, and your little desk miner in Perth.
If you want to understand why this number changes and what drives it up or down, our mining difficulty explainer covers the mechanics in detail.
Step 2: Your Share of the Network
Now let's place your miner in context. Say you're running a Lucky Miner LV06 at 500 GH/s. That's 0.0005 TH/s. Your share of the total network hashrate is:
0.0005 TH/s ÷ 850,000,000 TH/s = 0.000000000000588
That's roughly 5.88 × 10⁻¹³ — or about one in 1.7 trillion. For every block the network finds, your probability of being the one that found it is approximately one in 1.7 trillion.
Now let's do the same for a slightly more powerful device. The Bitaxe Gamma 602 at 1.5 TH/s gives you:
1.5 TH/s ÷ 850,000,000 TH/s = 0.00000000000176
That's about one in 567 billion per block. Better than the LV06, but still firmly in "astronomically unlikely" territory.
Step up to the NerdQX at 8 TH/s and your odds improve to roughly one in 106 billion per block. The NerdOCTAXE at 12 TH/s brings it to about one in 71 billion. Better still, but these are still numbers with the word "billion" in them.
Step 3: Blocks Per Day, Odds Per Day
Bitcoin produces roughly 144 blocks per day (one every ~10 minutes). So your daily probability is your per-block probability multiplied by 144. For the LV06:
144 × (1 / 1,700,000,000,000) ≈ 1 in 11.8 billion per day
For the Bitaxe Gamma 602 at 1.5 TH/s:
144 × (1 / 567,000,000,000) ≈ 1 in 3.9 billion per day
For the NerdQX at 8 TH/s:
144 × (1 / 106,000,000,000) ≈ 1 in 738 million per day
And for the NerdOCTAXE at 12 TH/s:
144 × (1 / 71,000,000,000) ≈ 1 in 492 million per day
To convert that into expected time to find a block, you can invert the daily probability. The LV06 would, on average, need to run for about 32,400 years to find a single block. The Gamma 602 sits at roughly 10,800 years. The NerdQX comes in at about 2,030 years, and the NerdOCTAXE at roughly 1,350 years.
These are averages based on constant network difficulty, which of course adjusts every 2,016 blocks and trends upward over time. In practice, as network hashrate grows, your odds get worse, not better.
Step 4: The Lottery Comparison
Let's make these numbers tangible by comparing them to familiar lotteries.
The odds of winning the Australian Powerball jackpot (division 1) are approximately 1 in 134 million. That means running a NerdOCTAXE solo miner for a single day gives you roughly the same odds as buying 3–4 Powerball tickets. Running a Bitaxe Gamma 602 for a day is like buying half a Powerball ticket. And the LV06? That's more like buying a hundredth of a ticket.
But here's the critical difference that makes solo mining more appealing than the lottery: your miner plays automatically, every ten minutes, 144 times a day, 365 days a year, for the cost of a few cents of electricity. You don't buy a new ticket each time. You plug it in once and it keeps rolling the dice forever. Over a full year, the NerdOCTAXE gets roughly 52,560 attempts — equivalent to buying 52,560 lottery entries. The annual odds are still long (about 1 in 1,350), but the cost of those "tickets" is just the electricity: around $30–50 per year at Australian rates for a 12W device.
When you frame it that way — $40 per year for a 1-in-1,350 shot at 3.125 BTC — the expected value calculation starts to look surprisingly interesting, even if the probability on any given day is vanishingly small.
Step 5: What About Luck Variance?
"Average time to find a block" is a statistical expectation, not a promise. Mining is a Poisson process — each hash attempt is independent, like each coin flip. The miner that's been running for five years has exactly the same probability of finding a block in the next ten minutes as the one that was plugged in thirty seconds ago.
This means some solo miners find blocks far sooner than the expected average — sometimes within days or weeks of starting. You've probably seen the headlines: "Solo miner with 5 TH/s finds a block." These events are real, verified on the blockchain, and they happen because someone has to be on the lucky end of the distribution curve. Our mining variance explainer goes deeper into why payouts fluctuate and what "luck" actually means mathematically.
But for every person who finds a block in their first month, there are thousands of solo miners who run their device for years and never find one. You only hear about the winners. Survivorship bias is very real in solo mining communities.
So Why Do People Still Do It?
If the odds are this extreme, why do thousands of people run solo miners? A few reasons:
- The cost is trivial. A device like the LV06 or Gamma 602 draws 5–15 watts. At $0.30/kWh, that's $13–$39 per year in electricity. For many people, that's less than a streaming subscription. It's a lottery ticket that runs itself.
- The upside is enormous. 3.125 BTC is currently worth well over $200,000 AUD. Even at absurd odds, the expected-value maths isn't as bad as it looks when the ticket price is measured in cents per day.
- It's a learning tool. Running a solo miner teaches you how Bitcoin mining actually works at a fundamental level — hashing, difficulty, nonces, block templates. Many people who start with a Bitaxe or LV06 graduate to larger machines later. Our open-source mining guide covers the educational side in detail.
- It supports network decentralisation. Every solo miner is an independent node constructing its own block template. You're not delegating block construction to a pool operator. That matters for Bitcoin's censorship resistance, and it's a philosophical position many home miners hold strongly.
- It's fun. There's something genuinely satisfying about having a little blinking miner on your desk, knowing it's out there taking shots at a block every few seconds. The Avalon Nano 3S even has a screen that shows your live hashrate and share count.
What If You Want Better Odds Without Going Industrial?
If the solo miner odds are too extreme for your taste but you still want to mine at home, the answer is pool mining with a more powerful machine. A Canaan Avalon A1246 at 90 TH/s pointed at an FPPS pool will earn small, steady daily payouts — no luck required. The WhatsMiner M30S and Avalon A1346 offer similar entry points into consistent pool mining.
You can also look at altcoin solo mining, where network hashrates are dramatically lower and block times are faster. A IceRiver KS0 Ultra mining Kaspa or a Goldshell Mini Doge III mining Dogecoin/Litecoin face much friendlier odds than a 500 GH/s device on the Bitcoin network, simply because those networks have a fraction of Bitcoin's hashrate. Our best altcoin ASICs guide compares the options.
For a direct head-to-head between popular solo devices, see our LV08 vs NerdQX comparison and our LV06 review.
The Bottom Line
Can a $100 miner find a Bitcoin block? Mathematically, yes. Practically, don't count on it. The odds range from roughly 1 in 1,350 per year for a 12 TH/s device down to 1 in 32,400 per year for a 500 GH/s device — and those odds get worse as the network grows.
But here's the thing: nobody buys a solo miner expecting reliable income. They buy it for the lottery ticket that costs cents per day, the education, the contribution to decentralisation, and the raw satisfaction of participating in Bitcoin at the protocol level. If you go in with that mindset, a solo miner is one of the most rewarding pieces of hardware you can own.
If you're ready to take your shot, browse our full range of solo Bitcoin miners, or start with our first miner setup guide to get up and running. We ship same-day from Perth before 2:00 PM AWST — so your miner could be hashing by tomorrow.
