Yes. A Bitaxe can find a Bitcoin block, and in July 2026 one did. The honest follow-up is that it almost never happens, and the numbers below show exactly how "almost never" works out for the hardware sitting on your desk.
At today's network difficulty, a 1 TH/s Bitaxe has roughly a 1-in-19,000 chance per year of finding a block. A 4 TH/s NerdQAxe has roughly 1 in 4,800. Each block attempt is independent, so you are never "due," and you are never out of the running either. That is what makes it a lottery.
The July 2026 Win
In July 2026, a single Bitaxe Gamma mining through Public Pool found block #957,382 and earned the full block reward of about 3.14 BTC, which CoinDesk valued at roughly $200,000 at the time. Reports say the device had been running for about eight hours at around 1 TH/s when it hit.
It was not the only one. CoinDesk reports that solo miners had found 12 blocks so far in 2026 as of mid-July, and 24 over the previous twelve months, a 41% increase on the year before. Counts differ between trackers depending on which devices they include, but the direction is clear: small home miners do occasionally win, and more of them are mining than ever.
The Real Odds, Right Now
Your chance of finding any given block is your hashrate divided by the total network hashrate. On October 16, 2026, difficulty rose 5.92% to 140.58T and network hashrate climbed back above 1 zettahash per second (1,000 EH/s). Plugging those into the math:
| Miner | Hashrate | Chance per year | Expected wait |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bitaxe Gamma / Ultra class | ~1 TH/s | ~0.005% | ~19,000 years |
| Bitaxe Ultra (tuned) | 1.2 TH/s | ~0.006% | ~16,000 years |
| NerdQAxe+ (4-chip) | ~4 TH/s | ~0.02% | ~4,800 years |
"Expected wait" is an average, not a schedule. It does not mean you will wait that long. It means that if the same attempt were repeated across a huge number of miners, the average time to the first win would be that long. Some win on day one. Most never do.
Why the Odds Keep Getting Longer
Difficulty adjusts roughly every two weeks to keep blocks arriving about every ten minutes. When more hashrate joins the network, difficulty rises and every miner's slice of it shrinks. The October 16 adjustment was the third-largest increase of 2026, so your odds today are about 6% worse than they were two weeks ago for the same hardware.
Difficulty also falls when hashrate leaves. Over the next adjustment, early projections point to a small further rise, but those estimates swing a lot until the period is nearly over.
What Does Not Change Your Odds
- Which solo pool you use. Pool choice affects uptime and fees, not probability. See our solo pool comparison.
- Mining longer without a win. Every attempt is independent. A miner that has run for two years has the same chance on the next block as a brand-new one.
- Firmware. Firmware can keep your chip stable, cool and online, and uptime is real, but no firmware can make a hash more likely to win. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
What you can control is hashrate, stable uptime, and electricity cost. Spending more on power than the miner could ever return is the one way to guarantee a loss, so the sensible approach is to treat it like a lottery ticket you happen to run 24/7 on a small power budget.
Is It Worth It, Then?
If you are mining for income, no. At these odds the expected return is a few dollars a year on a 1 TH/s miner. Use the LottoAxe odds calculator to see your own number from live network data.
If you are mining because the idea of a one-in-a-million chance at a block reward on a $150 device is fun, because you like open hardware, or because you want to run your own node and keep your hash power sovereign, it makes a lot of sense. People do it for exactly those reasons, and now and then one of them wins.
Solo mining is lottery mining. This article is not financial advice and does not guarantee blocks, rewards, profits or improved odds. Numbers are estimates from network data as of October 2026 and change with every difficulty adjustment.
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