Miner earns over R$ 7 million in bitcoin after completing the process alone

Source: Exame Original Title: Miner earns over R$ 7 million in bitcoin after completing process alone Original Link: An unknown miner challenged the market statistics and managed, single-handedly, to complete the mining process of the cryptocurrency. As a result, he ended up with the entire “reward” from the operation, valued at US$ 1.45 million (R$ 7.81 million at the current exchange rate), drawing the market's attention.

The case was identified by Con Kolivas, a computer engineer and one of the administrators of a cryptocurrency mining network. According to Kolivas, a miner has “one chance in 180 million” of completing the mining process alone, without the participation of other colleagues.

Bitcoin mining started as a simple and relatively cheap activity, but it has become more complex over the years. Today, it has high costs, high energy consumption, requires advanced computers, and ultimately gathers large companies or groups of miners.

The main reason is that miners compete with each other to solve complex mathematical problems and gain the right to “validate” information that will be recorded on the cryptocurrency's blockchain network. In return, they receive a fixed reward and a variable amount, depending on how much users are willing to offer.

The additional value in the reward is contributed by users who want to “jump the queue” of validations. The higher the offered value, the faster the processing. The reward in this case indicates that the miner was able to validate information that had significant additional rewards.

Although cases like this are rare, individual miners have been able to mine more blocks of information lately thanks to the development of equipment that aggregates and distributes the computational power of groups of miners, without forming networks or cooperatives that would require the division of rewards.

With this, cases like the one reported by Kolivas have become more common, but they are still far from becoming the majority of bitcoin mining operations. The measure also helps to preserve a good profit margin for individual miners, who generally have leaner and cheaper operations.

Meanwhile, large cryptocurrency miners continue to be pressured by rising costs due to the increasing complexity of operations and the recent decline in the asset's price. Consequently, some have diversified their businesses, focusing on the field of artificial intelligence.