The scale of mining
How big is the thing you are playing against? This page travels from a single hash to the entire Bitcoin network — a few zeroes at a time. All of it is real: gear figures are measured, pool and network figures are live.
One hash
Mining is guessing. Each hash is one guess at a number the Bitcoin network redraws about every second — one lottery ticket, checked and thrown away in a microsecond. This is the atom everything below is made of.
A NerdMiner — $10 of ESP32
The smallest real miner people run for fun: a Wi-Fi dev board on a shelf, guessing 74 thousand times a second. Its odds are astronomically long — and it holds exactly the same ticket price per hash as everything below.
A fast desktop CPU
A modern desktop running the SoloLuck CPU miner makes about 540 million guesses a second (measured, AVX-512). Every screen from here on, your whole computer becomes a single dot.
A Bitaxe — palm-sized ASIC
One silent chip on a desk: 1.2 trillion guesses a second. A Bitaxe out-guesses every computer you have ever owned, combined — this is what purpose-built silicon does to the curve.
SoloLuck — this pool, right now
Operator rigs and community miners together, live as this page rendered. Every one of these guesses mines true-solo: whoever finds the block keeps the entire reward.
The whole Bitcoin network
Every second, the world makes this many guesses — about 99.7 billion every second for every human alive. This is what secures Bitcoin, and it is the lottery drum your ticket goes into.
And yet — every ~10 minutes, exactly one guess wins.
The next winning guess is worth 3.14285443 BTC (≈ $201,014). The network doesn't know or care whose machine makes it: a Bitaxe on a desk in Jakarta pays the same ticket price per hash as a warehouse in Texas. That is solo mining — astronomical odds, honest ones.
Gear figures are typical measured values; pool and network figures were live when this page rendered — watch them move on the status page.