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 bitcoin miner defied market statistics and managed to complete the cryptocurrency mining process alone. 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), and caught 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 peers.

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

The main reason is that miners compete with each other to solve complex mathematical problems and earn 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 included 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.

Despite the rarity of cases like this, individual miners have been able to mine more blocks of information lately thanks to the development of equipment that sums 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 are under pressure from 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 area of artificial intelligence.