How long does it take to mine one bitcoin? The math, machine by machine

Nobody mines one bitcoin at a time. Roughly every ten minutes the network adds a block, and whoever finds it, a solo miner or a pool A server that machines connect to. A regular pool shares the earnings, a solo pool does not. Solo or pool?, receives the reward in one go: brand-new bitcoin, the subsidy, plus the fees of the block’s transactions. Since the halving The reward in new bitcoin is cut in half every 210,000 blocks, roughly every four years. The last one, in April 2024, brought it to 3.125 BTC. of 20 April 2024, at block 840,000, the subsidy has been 3.125 BTC; with fees, recent blocks paid 3.137 BTC on average (network as of 17 October 2026).

Every 210,000 blocks, about four years, the subsidy is cut in half: that is the halving. The date of the next one is an estimate, because it depends on the actual pace of blocks, slightly faster than ten minutes when the network hashrate Computing power: the number of attempts per second of a machine or of the whole network. The higher it is, the more tickets you play in each draw. grows. From that day, every machine will earn half as much new bitcoin for the same work.

So your machine does not build “its” bitcoin: it takes part in a draw, about 144 times a day, against every machine in the world. There are two ways to play, and two answers to the question.

In a regular pool, thousands of machines search together, and each one is paid for its work, in small regular amounts. Your share is your hashrate divided by the whole network’s, about 1,006 EH/s (network as of 17 October 2026): multiplied by the year’s blocks and their average reward, it gives what you would receive in a year, before the pool’s fee.

Even the most powerful machine in this table, the Thor P2 at 10 TH/s, would take about 610 years. To build up one bitcoin a year, you would need about 6,100 TH/s, the equivalent of about 610 Thor P2 units: 610 machines for one year, or a single one for 610 years, it is the same calculation. Watch out for some pools’ minimum payout too: with a small machine, reaching it can take months, even years.

And this math is optimistic. It freezes the difficulty: if the network hashrate grows, difficulty follows, and your share shrinks accordingly. It also freezes the reward: at the 2028 halving, your output of new bitcoin will be cut in half, then again roughly every four years. At that rate, a home machine will most likely never reach 1 bitcoin: only about 900,000 bitcoin are left to be issued, for every miner in the world (end of October 2026). Even running forever on a network that stopped growing, a Thor P2 would only receive about 0.009 BTC of them, transaction fees aside.

The same math in sats per day, for a Bitaxe: How much does a Bitaxe earn?

The last column of the table answers “how much does it cost to mine a bitcoin”: at €0.20 per kWh, from €112,000 to €668,000 of electricity depending on the machine, when a bitcoin can be bought for about €72,500 (network as of 17 October 2026). So every machine I have reviewed spends more on electricity than the bitcoin it produces is worth, by 1.5 to 9.2 times.

This cost does not depend on the size of the machine, but on its efficiency, in joules per TH (J/TH The energy used for a trillion attempts: the lower, the more efficient the machine. A Bitaxe Gamma runs at about 15 J/TH. The comparison). A small machine takes longer, but each bitcoin needs as many kWh from it as from a big one with the same efficiency. With the Thor X1, the best efficiency I have measured at the wall (10.6 J/TH in normal mode), one bitcoin needs about 560,000 kWh: for it to cost less than its price, electricity would need to be under about €0.13 per kWh. With a Thor P2 (15.3 J/TH, also measured at the wall), the threshold drops to about €0.09.

At home, 13 machines run on a shelf: about 50 TH/s for 500 to 600 W, roughly €70 of electricity a month on my EDF Tempo plan. At the network’s pace, they would need about 120 years to build up one bitcoin in a pool. Two things soften the bill: the heat, which warms the room in winter (heating your home by mining), and your own kWh price, which may not be €0.20 (power use and electricity cost): the solo mining calculator lets you enter yours.

Solo, you do not receive a share An attempt good enough to be counted by the pool. It proves your machine is working, even if it is not enough to find a block. of every block: you play for the whole block, about €227,000 at the price on 17 October 2026, and you receive nothing the rest of the time. At each block, your machine has a chance equal to its share of the network. Over a day, a year or ten years, here is what that gives:

Read “1 chance in 16,000 a year” like this: out of 16,000 Bitaxe Gamma units running for a year, a single one will find a block, on average. It is also the “average time” you read everywhere: one block every 16,000 years. My shelf, about 50 TH/s, has about 1 chance in 383 a year, and it has never found a Bitcoin block yet. For your machine, or several at once, the calculator redoes this math with the live network hashrate.

“One block every 16,000 years on average” does not mean you have to wait 16,000 years, nor that you get closer over time. Every block is a fresh draw, independent of the previous ones: your machine builds up no progress.

• It can happen tomorrow. The chance on any given day is tiny, but it is the same every day, and small machines have already won whole blocks: blocks found solo.
• It may never happen. Even after waiting the average time, there is about a 37% chance of having found nothing. For even odds, a Bitaxe Gamma has to run for about 11,000 years; over ten years, its chance is only about 1 in 1,600.
• Time served does not count. A machine that has been mining for three years is no closer to a block than one plugged in this morning: at the next draw, they have the same chance.
• Your best share is not a progress bar. It is a record, the closest attempt so far, not a gauge: it does not bring you closer to a block (mining difficulty explained).

That is exactly how a lottery works, hence the name “lottery mining” for solo mining with a small machine: one more ticket with every attempt, and no ticket remembers the others.

In France’s Loto, run by FDJ, a grid costs €2.20 and has 1 chance in 19,068,840 of winning the jackpot, with the 5 right numbers and the Chance number: that is the figure in the official rules of the game (in French). Against one day of solo mining:

So one day of Bitaxe Gamma gives about 3 times better odds of a jackpot than one Loto grid, at about 25 times less cost. Over a year, its odds match those of about 1,200 grids, around €2,600 of stakes, for about €32 of electricity.

But the prize is not the same: a block is worth about €227,000 at the price on 17 October 2026, the Loto jackpot at least €2 million according to FDJ. And in both cases the average loses: the Loto pays 55.35% of stakes back to winners, and a Bitaxe Gamma’s average earnings are worth about 45% of its electricity. I made a video on this comparison: Solo mining Bitcoin or playing the lottery: which has better odds? (in French)

One real warning, though: ESP32 “lottery miners”, sold as a chance to win, have almost none. How to spot them.

Bitcoin Cash, born from a split of Bitcoin in 2017, uses the same calculation, SHA-256: the same machines can mine it. But its network is much smaller: as of 28 October 2026, its difficulty is about 270 times lower than Bitcoin’s (network as of 17 October 2026), so a machine has about 270 times better odds of finding a block there. A Bitaxe Gamma gets about 1 chance in 59 a year. On the other hand, a block is only worth about €840 there (3.125 BCH, roughly $930): on average, a machine earns about the same on both networks, only the shape of the lottery changes. FindMyBlock, the pool I built, also runs a Bitcoin Cash solo pool, with a 1.5% fee, where a Bitaxe found a block on 1 October 2026: it is all explained on the page Bitcoin Cash solo mining.

If your goal is to own a bitcoin, the answer is simple: at €0.20 per kWh, buying it costs less than mining it at home, with any machine I have reviewed, and that is before counting the price of the machine. This is not investment advice: the bitcoin price and the difficulty move, and these figures with them.

Mining at home is for something else: understanding Bitcoin by running it, taking part in a less concentrated network, putting the heat to use in winter, and holding a lottery ticket with small but real odds. The full picture, average earnings and electricity: is Bitcoin mining profitable? To try for the block, you still need to pick a pool: which solo pool to choose. FindMyBlock, the pool I built, charges no fee and sends the reward straight to your address.