Bitaxe Solo Miner vs Powerball: The Honest Odds Compared

By Dominik Lederer, Founder, Hardware Engineer and Solo Mining Expert at Polarblocks. Network figures read from mempool.space on 17 September 2026 at 06:09 UTC, with the exchange rate carrying its own timestamp of 06:05 UTC. Powerball odds and prize amounts read from powerball.com the same morning.

One hundred and forty. That is how much better your odds are with a small box on a shelf than with a Powerball line played religiously, three times a week, for a year. It is also the least interesting number in this article.

The interesting ones start when you put the two side by side on cost, on what happens when you lose, and on what either purchase leaves you holding on 31 December. I sell one of these two things, which is exactly why every figure below names its source and its denominator.

What are the real odds of a Bitaxe solo miner finding a block?

The honest figure is about 1 in 13,352 within a year. A Bitaxe Gamma 601 running 1.3 terahash per second takes part in 52,560 block rounds a year, and at the difficulty of 127,450,789,715,843 recorded on 17 September 2026 each individual round carries odds of about 1 in 701,790,992. Every round is independent of every round before it.

That figure comes out of three steps. Multiply the difficulty by 2 to the power of 32 and divide by your own hashrate in hashes per second, which gives roughly 421,070,000,000 seconds of mean search time. Divide by 31,536,000 seconds per year and you have about 13,352 years. The reciprocal of that is the annual chance. The single round figure of 1 in 701,790,992 comes from the unrounded search time of 421,074,595,138 seconds rather than from the rounded 13,352 above, so multiplying the printed numbers back together misses by nearly ten thousand.

Two caveats sit next to it. The 1.3 terahash per second is the Polarblocks factory rating, while the upstream bitaxeGamma repository states about 1.2 terahash per second for the reference design, and that gap alone moves the annual odds from 1 in 13,352 to 1 in 14,465. A device overclocked to 1.4 lands at about 1 in 12,398. The 17 watts are just as rounded: product data give a band of 15 to 19 watts, which puts a year of electricity anywhere between 45.99 and 58.25 euros at our house tariff rather than precisely 52.12. None of these is exact, and anyone quoting any of these to four significant figures is quoting arithmetic, not a measurement.

How do those odds compare with a year of Powerball tickets?

Powerball publishes jackpot odds of 1 in 292,201,338 for a 2 dollar play. Drawings run every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday, which is 156 a year. One line bought for every drawing therefore reaches roughly 1 in 1,873,086 across the year, our own division rather than a published figure. The Bitaxe lands at 1 in 13,352.

That comparison hurts our side on the single event. One Bitaxe round at 1 in 701,790,992 is nearly two and a half times as hopeless as one Powerball line, so the miner wins only across a full year, and only because it enters 52,560 draws while the ticket buyer enters 156. The ticket buyer, for their part, sinks 312 dollars a year to do it.

The currencies are deliberately left alone. Powerball prices and prizes are quoted in US dollars because that is the game's own currency, and Polarblocks prices in euros because that is the shop's. No conversion is applied anywhere in this article. Where two costs sit side by side you have to bring your own rate, and none of the probability figures depend on one.

Which of the two gives more back for the money spent?

Neither of these two bets returns what it costs, and the answer flips depending on which year you are in. One block on 17 September 2026 carried 3.125 BTC plus transaction fees, and at 66,564 euros per bitcoin the bare reward was worth 208,012.50 euros. Spread across 13,352 years of expected search that is about 15.58 euros a year from the reward alone.

Two adjustments follow, and both are disclosed here. Average transaction fees add about 10 cents a year on the mean, which lifts the figure to roughly 15.67 euros, or about 8 cents and 15.65 euros on the median. This article assumes the device mines to Solo CKPool, which describes its charge as 2 percent on top of the transaction fees while the coinbase transaction of a block it relayed shows the 2 percent taken from the whole amount. Either way about 15.36 euros remains.

As a ratio it depends entirely on which denominator you pick, so here are all of them, measured against the 15.67 euros before the service fee. Against 52.12 euros of electricity at 0.35 euros per kilowatt hour the return is 30.1 percent. Against 55.10 euros at the BDEW figure of 37.0 cents it is 28.4 percent. Against a full first year of 181.12 euros including the 129 euro device it is 8.7 percent, and against 201.12 euros for the 149 euro Arctic Night edition, 7.8 percent. After the 2 percent fee those four become 29.5, 27.9, 8.5 and 7.6 percent.

Powerball does not publish a payout percentage, so I calculated a floor from its own prize chart. Adding up the eight set cash prize tiers at their published odds gives about 0.32 dollars of expected return on a 2 dollar play, or 16.0 percent of stake, before the pari-mutuel jackpot is counted at all. The true figure is therefore higher than 16.0 percent and cannot be pinned down from the chart, and the chart notes that those set amounts turn pari-mutuel in California. What Powerball does state plainly is that on average 35 percent of every 2 dollar ticket stays in the jurisdiction where it is sold, funding public programmes and services.

So which gives more back? In the first year the question has a clean answer against us: Powerball returns at least 16.0 percent of stake, the Bitaxe 8.7 percent of a 181.12 euro outlay, and a floor that already wins stays winning whatever the jackpot adds. From the second year the comparison stops being decidable. The Bitaxe returns 30.1 percent of its electricity bill, Powerball returns 16.0 percent plus a jackpot share the prize chart does not let anyone quantify, and the Bitaxe figure includes its own jackpot while the Powerball figure excludes theirs. Those two percentages are not the same measurement and should never be quoted beside each other without their denominators attached.

The tempting number deserves a warning. Electricity alone breaks even at about 10.53 cents per kilowatt hour before the service fee and 10.31 cents after it, which sounds like an answer to whether this pays. It is not. That threshold ignores the purchase price entirely, and once 129 euros is in the calculation there is no positive break even in year one at any German household tariff. The full arithmetic sits in our profitability breakdown.

Does a Bitaxe solo miner have a worse chance of winning anything at all?

Yes, and by a wide margin. Powerball lists nine prize tiers and overall odds of 1 in 24.87 of winning something on a 2 dollar play, most of it the 4 dollar consolation at 1 in 38.32. A Bitaxe Gamma 601 has exactly one tier. It finds a whole block or it finds nothing, for years, with no partial credit of any kind.

This is the part of solo mining that product pages skip, and it is the reason I put it in the middle of the article rather than a footnote. Solo CKPool states on its own front page that shares are cosmetic for feedback only. The best difficulty record on your dashboard is a near-miss counter, not a progress bar. Nothing accumulates, ever.

Five years of running accumulates nothing. It buys 262,800 independent draws, which together come to roughly 1 in 2,670 if difficulty stood still, which it will not, and it costs 389.60 euros with the device and electricity counted. The cost figure assumes 0.35 euros per kilowatt hour holds for five years. The span also crosses the halving expected in the first half of 2028, after which every round plays for 1.5625 BTC plus transaction fees instead of 3.125 BTC plus transaction fees.

How does a Bitaxe compare with a lottery ticket and an industrial miner?

The Bitaxe Gamma 601 sits between them on odds and far below both on cost. An Antminer S21 Pro at 234 terahash per second reaches roughly 1 in 74 a year, the Bitaxe Gamma 601 roughly 1 in 13,352, and a Powerball line played in every drawing roughly 1 in 1,873,086. The revealing column is not the odds. It is what a year of holding costs.

ASIC Miner Value lists the S21 Pro at 3,510 watts and 75 decibels, with a stated tolerance of 5 percent on hashrate and power draw. At the house tariff its electricity comes to roughly 10,760 euros a year, or between about 10,200 and 11,300 once that tolerance is applied. Divide 3,510 watts by 230 volts and you get around 15.3 amperes, our own arithmetic rather than a figure from that site, just under the 16 ampere design of a household circuit and not a load such a circuit should carry around the clock. The site is an aggregator rather than the manufacturer, which is worth knowing before anyone cites it as a spec sheet.

Criterion	Bitaxe Gamma 601	Powerball line, every drawing	Antminer S21 Pro
Winning chances per year	52,560 rounds a year, each one playing for a full block of 3.125 BTC plus transaction fees minus a 2 percent service fee, annual odds about 1 in 13,352, and exactly one prize tier with no smaller wins	156 drawings a year on one line, annual jackpot odds about 1 in 1,873,086 from the published 1 in 292,201,338 per drawing, but nine prize tiers and overall odds of 1 in 24.87 of winning something	Annual odds of about 1 in 74 on a full block, reachable only with an industrial power supply and cooling that a flat cannot provide
Running costs in a home setting	About 52.12 euros of electricity a year at 0.35 euros per kilowatt hour, roughly 4.34 euros a month from an ordinary wall socket, plus a one-off device price of 129 euros that makes 181.12 euros across the first year	312 US dollars of stake a year at 2 dollars a play, due again in full every year, with nothing carried over and no object left after the drawing	Roughly 10,760 euros of electricity a year at 3,510 watts, about 15.3 amperes of continuous load at 230 volts, plus a one-off purchase price that we do not quote here because we have no source for it we would stand behind
Drawer risk (boredom factor)	Low, because the best difficulty record visibly moves on the dashboard, even though that record is a near-miss counter and accumulates nothing. We check the acoustics of every unit on the bench but publish no decibel figure for the Eco Line, so treat the noise as something to try, not a spec	High, because within minutes of the drawing there is nothing left to look at, hold or show anyone	Very high indoors, because 75 decibels of constant noise sends the machine to a basement or a garage where nobody watches it
Learning effect & blockchain fascination you can touch	High, because difficulty, retargets, hashrate and the block reward stop being abstractions once they move numbers on hardware you own	None, because choosing five numbers and a red ball teaches nothing that transfers anywhere else	Present, but noise, waste heat and power draw make the machine impractical to keep anywhere you actually spend time

What does the next difficulty retarget do to this comparison?

The retarget moves one side of this comparison and leaves the other untouched. At block height 967,373 on 17 September 2026, mempool.space projected the next retarget at block 967,680 for around 19 September, at plus 4.16 percent. That would push the annual odds from about 1 in 13,352 to about 1 in 13,908 and trim the expected value from 15.67 to about 15.05 euros.

Treat that projection as a band, not a point. Run the 307 blocks still outstanding at the daily hashrate means of the three days to 17 September, which ranged from about 874 to about 1,021 exahash per second, and the retarget lands anywhere between plus 2.74 and plus 5.22 percent. Annual odds then run from about 1 in 13,719 to about 1 in 14,049, and the expected value from about 15.26 down to about 14.90 euros.

Powerball odds do not move at all. Five numbers from 1 to 69 and one red ball from 1 to 26 produce 292,201,338 combinations whatever anyone else is doing, and the operator states this directly in its own FAQ around the UK sales start of 21 July 2026: a larger player base changes jackpot size, not odds. Bitcoin difficulty is the opposite kind of machine. It retunes every 2,016 blocks specifically to cancel out whatever the rest of the network just did.

The expected value moves in both directions, though not evenly. The fee series for the week to 17 September 2026 held 818 data points, a sample rather than every block of that week, averaging about 0.01917 BTC of fees per block with a median of 0.01515, and that fee income adds roughly 10 cents a year on the mean. The projected retarget takes about 63 cents away. The downward pull is currently about six and a half times the upward one, which is why calling 15.67 euros a floor would be generous. Note also that a difficulty rise of 4.16 percent cuts the expected value by 4.0 percent rather than 4.16, because the denominator is what grew.

A Powerball ticket and a Bitaxe are the same bet in different clothes. Both are overwhelmingly likely to give you nothing. Only one of them runs on 4.34 euros a month of electricity, or 15.09 euros a month across the first year once the device is counted, against 26 US dollars a month for three drawings a week in a currency I am deliberately not converting. Only one of them teaches you how a monetary network actually works, and is still sitting on your shelf when the drawing is over.

Dominik Lederer, Founder Polarblocks

Frequently asked questions

Are the odds of a Bitaxe solo miner better than Powerball?
Yes, by roughly a factor of 140 over a year. A Bitaxe Gamma 601 at 1.3 terahash per second reaches about 1 in 13,352 a year at a difficulty of 127,450,789,715,843, while one Powerball line played in all 156 drawings of a year reaches about 1 in 1,873,086.

What does a Bitaxe solo miner cost to run for a year?
About 52.12 euros of electricity. The Bitaxe Gamma 601 draws roughly 17 watts, which is 148.92 kilowatt hours across 8,760 hours, at a house assumption of 0.35 euros per kilowatt hour. At the BDEW figure of 37.0 cents the same year costs 55.10 euros. The 129 euro device is a separate one-off.

Can a Bitaxe solo miner win a smaller prize?
No. A Bitaxe has one prize tier and wins a whole block or nothing, unlike Powerball, which lists nine tiers and overall odds of 1 in 24.87 of winning something. Solo CKPool states that shares on its service are cosmetic for feedback only, so a rising best difficulty record is a near-miss counter rather than progress.

Is a Bitaxe solo miner a good investment?
No. The expected value on 17 September 2026 was about 15.67 euros a year before the service fee and about 15.36 euros after it, against about 52.12 euros of electricity and a 129 euro purchase price. Buy one because you want the object and the odds, not because the arithmetic works.