There’s a buzz about a solo miner who hit a jackpot worth over 2 million yen with just $75 in rental hash power.

This really happened. An individual miner rented mining capacity of 1 petahash per second through CKPool and validated block 938,092. As a result, they received the full reward of 3.125 BTC. At current BTC prices, that’s worth over $200k. The investment was only $75. In other words, a 2,600 times return.

This is almost like winning the lottery. The probability is comparable to searching for a specific grain of sand on the beach, yet it actually happened. However, such jackpot-like events are no longer as rare as they used to be. The proliferation of on-demand hash rate rental services has lowered the barrier to entry for mining.

Over the past year, 21 individual miners have collectively obtained 66 BTC (worth over $4 million at current prices). On average, they find a block every 17 days. Despite the network difficulty rising to 144.4 trillion, successful solo mining cases have increased by 17%.

Mining used to be a game for huge corporations, but now you can start with just a few dollars via cloud services. No hardware is needed. It’s become possible to participate in mining much like buying a scratch card.

By the way, this lucky miner succeeded right after a sharp drop in hash rate caused by a severe winter storm in China. They timed their move well and spent only $75, which created the jackpot.

Oh, and by the way, XRP has dropped to $1.33. It’s still below the $1.40 resistance, and selling pressure seems to be continuing.