A $150 mining machine, a lottery with an expected value spanning 18,000 years—he really scratched one off and hit it.

A miner used a Bitaxe device worth $150 to mine block 957,382 in a public mining pool and earned 3.1382 BTC (about $200k). Of this, 3.125 BTC was the block reward, and 0.0132 BTC was the transaction fee. Its average hashrate was about 995.2 GH/s, close to 1 TH/s, but it represents only a tiny fraction of the Bitcoin network. Based on CoinDesk’s estimates, at this rate it would take about 18k years to find a block. Although solo miners have found 24 blocks in the past 12 months, solo mining is not predictable.