This solo bitcoin miner earned over $215,000 using a $150 USB-based mining rig called GekkoScience 2-Pac Compac miner

In early 2021 bitcoin miners earned a record hourly revenue of $4 million as the price of bitcoin exploded, according to data from blockchain analytics firm Glassnode. The amount was the highest hourly miner revenue in Bitcoin’s history. Since then, the prices of bitcoin has fluctuated from its record high of $69,000 in November to a little over $36,000 as of the time of writing.

However, with all the successes of big bitcoin miners, ordinary people haven’t been able to mine Bitcoin at a profit for years. Bitcoin mining requires expensive hardware which is beyond the reach of an average person. But solo bitcoin miners with relatively small hardware have found success in recent weeks using USB-based mining rigs.

The most recent instance comes from a solo USB miner participating in “solo.ckpool.org,” which claimed to offer “no frills, no fuss 2% fee anonymous solo bitcoin mining for everyone.” Unlike mega miners with big rigs, the miner mining using solo.ckpool.org solved a block with a rig that had a hashrate of approximately 8.3 terahashes per second (TH/s) and earned more than $215,000 worth of BTC.

According to ckpool, the types of USB miners used are available from retailers like Amazon and Bitcoin Merch (when you can find them in stock). Dr. Con Kolivas, a software engineer of Bitcoin’s cgminer,ckpool,and the admin of http://solo.ckpool.org, first reported about the earning on Twitter. In a tweet, Dr. Kolivas said:

“Congratulations to another miner with approximately 86TH solving a solo block on http://solo.ckpool.org ! There are a lot more miners now on the solo pool and if enough people are mining solo, someone will eventually be the lucky one as here.”

And it looks like our miner is happy to not remain anonymous as he posted this on the forum thread. pic.twitter.com/xE4NxDyBqh

— Dr -ck (@ckpooldev) January 24, 2022

The solo miner was shocked to wake up to see that he/she has earned hundreds of thousands of dollars from mining. In a message, the miner wrote: “Just waking up and seeing that my GekkoScience Compac F USB stick farm just hit.”

A cursory search on Amazon shows that the miner uses “Rev 2 GekkoScience 2-Pac Compac USB Stick Bitcoin Miner 15gh/s+ (BM1384x2)” and has a rig capable of an 86 TH/s hashrate, but It was operating at one-tenth that performance when the block was solved. For context, the Antminer S19 Pro+ Hyd recently announced by Bitmain recently, is capable of reaching a hashrate of approximately 199 TH/s. That’s more than twice what this setup offers.

Credit: Amazon.com

Meanwhile, according to the website, mining at solo.ckpool.org helps solo bitcoin miners to avoid the overheads of running a full bitcoin node that requires both great storage and bandwidth for optimal performance.

The site, Solo.ckpool.org, is also connected to high speed low latency bitcoin nodes for rapid block change notification and propagation. “Unlike regular pools, ckpool never mines transaction-free blocks due to its ultra-scaleable code which has miners on both new blocks and transactions concurrently,” the site wrote.

Below is a video of YouTuber by the name Dr. Unlimited talking about Gekkoscience 2pac Bitcoin USB Miner

https://youtu.be/iJ548lK_SG4