Woofun AI reports that an independent miner successfully mined Bitcoin block 957,382 using a Bitaxe device valued at approximately $150. Operating for only eight hours with a hash rate of roughly 1 TH/s, the miner earned 3.1382 BTC, equivalent to about $200,000. This occurrence is statistically estimated to happen once every 18,000 years and marks the second instance of a Bitaxe device independently mining a block via the Public Pool service.

Bitaxe is an open-source, credit card-sized ASIC miner utilizing the Bitmain BM1370 chip, identical to the industrial-grade Antminer S21, while consuming only 15 to 21 watts of power. Over the past 12 months, independent miners have extracted 24 blocks, representing a 41% year-on-year increase and totaling 75.44 BTC.

Additionally, Bitcoin mining difficulty decreased by 5% to 1.2717 trillion on July 12, following a drop of over 10% in mid-June.