The block party is done, we did not find a block.

However, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive, we all had some fun and I learned a few things along the way.

The lowest bid occurred about halfway through the auction and was an outlier, the average winning bid was ~5,000 sats.

The highest 3 winning bids occurred at the end of the auction.

The high cost of bidding near the end of the auction led to some frustration, so I held a few auctions aside to sell peer-to-peer - no one took me up on them.

CK Pool is a great resource for solo mining block parties. The json api allows everyone to verify the mining and the pool has a track record of successfully mined blocks. The new solostats gui is nice too.

The anonymous gift of +650 TH/s once we started mining was awesome.

We mined for 24+ hours and, while we managed to hash some high-scoring difficulty shares in the trillions, still fell short of hashing a block below the network difficulty

One of the first things I heard when I started learning about mining was "it's like a lottery.. it isn't just solving complex math problems" ... and while this is somewhat true, in the sense of finding a serviceable hash, the concept of "mining as lottery" discounts all the work that goes into finding that hash.

It's a huge amount of work to mine!

Our party mined with ~5 PH/s, or roughly 40 mining rigs consuming ~3KW each. We generated trillions upon trillions of hashes, some of which were near(ish) to the target.

I'm sure Pick 4 and Powerball use their share of electricity; however, buying a lottery ticket is no comparison to the work done by bitcoin miners.

You only truly feel the network's difficulty when you try to mine a block.

Even with almost 5 PH/s across our party, we faced long odds of mining a block -- 1 in 1,000+ for 24 hours. Compare the odds of winning a single number in roulette (1 in 36) gives an idea of how long the odds are -- though nowhere near as long as solo mining with 1 TH/s (1 in 5,820,208 for 24 hours)

And so, yes I get that the network difficulty's purpose and that the difficulty adjustment keeps the network the "right size" for ~10 minute block times and keeps things balanced ... yeah ok, but when you're mining to get a solo block, you want the network difficulty low!

Network difficulty of ~110 Trillion makes for a mighty high bar to go over (or under)

If the network difficulty was 100x lower, our 5 PH/s would have found a block and we would by splitting up $300k in bitcoin right now.

One of my favorite catchphrases is follow the money, it always leads to new insights.

Who benefits from 110 Trillion network difficulty? Hardware vendors? Bitcoiners? Miners?

It's always great to sell shovels, and bitcoiners certainly benefit from a wall of energy securing their net worth ... but pity the miner.

Satoshi gave us a wonderful gift 16 years ago and network difficulty has proven to be a balanced way to scale the network to trillions in value.

Unfortunately for miners - and especially solo miners! - Satoshi's gift came bundled with an arms race. It did not include a way to coordinate a cooperative reduction in difficulty.

There's no way, today, for every miner to stand down 90% of their fleet - which is certainly in every miner's interest to do - and benefit from lower difficulty.

Maybe one day.

In the meantime, the block party was a blast and I'll continue hosting them.

Stay tuned for the next one on Jan 11th.

Thanks for reading, Evan