Yes, I know, I saw a video of someone explaining the concept of solo mining. I was really amused to see how it worked, and that's what got me into the topic of crypto. The concept is simple: instead of mining in a pool with many people and sharing the rewards based on who mined the most, you mine alone, and if you manage to hit a block, you keep the entire reward for yourself (minus the network usage fees). So, I wanted to have fun setting everything up properly, just like a real cryptocurrency miner but on a very small scale. A little desk decoration that tries to hit a BTC block.
I simply took an ESP32, flashed it with the NerdMinerV2 firmware, connected it to my WiFi network in a separate VLAN, and linked it to my BTC account— and that was it, all set up! Then, I designed a small 3D-printed stand so it could proudly sit on my desk. That way, every time I look at it, I can think to myself, "I definitely made the right choice doing this instead of studying the night before an exam." (Don't worry, I passed it!)
Let's do some quick calculations. My ESP32 mines at an average of 60Kh/s. Let's take a very arbitrary value of approximately 500 EH/s, which is 500 × 10¹⁸ H/s. This means I have 1 in 8.3 × 10¹⁵ (about 8,300 trillion) chances of finding the right block... Or... Since a block is found every 10 minutes, that would mean 160 billion years.
\[ \frac{5 \times 10^{18} \text{ seconds}}{60 \times 60 \times 24 \times 365} \approx 1.6 \times 10^{11} \text{ Years} \]
Yeah... I’m going to have to wait. 😅