Bitcoin Mining vs Lottery: Which Odds Are Better?

You have much better odds of earning Bitcoin (BTC +2.69%) through solo mining than by participating in a lottery and praying for a windfall. That’s right!

It is more likely that you’ll get the chance to mine the next block and win 3.125 BTC plus mining fees than win the billion-dollar jackpot, in which tens of millions of people try their luck.

Just this month, the $1.787 billion Powerball jackpot sold a total of 162 million tickets for a chance to win the second-largest jackpot in US history. The single-largest winning ticket for the record $2.04 bln lottery was sold in 2022.

Interestingly, as the prize money gets bigger, people from all backgrounds, both the rich and the poor, put up their hard-earned money to try and win the life-altering jackpot.

However, the rate of participation differs between the two, with lower-income groups participating at higher rates and spending a higher percentage of their income than wealthier individuals.

Those who habitually play lottery games actually see this gamble as an investment rather than a form of entertainment. Yet, 30% to 70% of lottery winners end up declaring bankruptcy. 

A Game of Pure Chance

A lottery, by definition, is a form of gambling as the success is entirely governed by chance. 

It involves drawing numbers at random for a prize, which typically is the amount left after expenses like promotion, profits, and taxes. People purchase lottery tickets or chances, and from a pool of all the sold tickets, the winning ones are drawn.

The lottery industry is made up of both private and public organizations offering a variety of lottery products such as drawing games and scratch-off games. The products are sold through mobile apps, online websites, and retail outlets.

It is a highly regulated industry in many jurisdictions, generating a substantial amount of revenue that governments use to support various programs and causes.

These easy-to-play lottery games have been very popular among the general public for centuries, and their appeal has only been growing in recent times.

As the economy gets depressing, financial hardship and unemployment rates are driving people to gambling and lotteries.

But that’s not all. Factors like targeted advertising & algorithms, internet access, and mobile apps making gambling available 24/7, digital payments making transactions easier and faster, government legalization making participation socially acceptable, and the allure of “winning big” are all leading to a rise in gambling and lotteries.

Driven by this combination of financial stress, emotional appeal, technological ease, cultural acceptance, and weak regulatory frameworks, the global lottery market size has reached $331.89 billion in 2025.

As the most legal and publicly accessible form of betting, the lottery game is popular globally, with the World Lottery Association comprising 88 countries with legalized lottery operations. 

In fact, about 100 countries worldwide have their own national lotteries. Meanwhile, the number of users worldwide is projected to surpass 755 million by 2029.

The US actually accounts for 27.21% of the global lottery market share, and the local lottery industry is expected to increase by over $50 billion by 2029. In 2023, Americans spent more than $100 billion on the lottery nationwide, according to statistics from the US Census Bureau. New York, meanwhile, leads US states in lottery sales revenue, producing $10.549 billion in 2024.

An average adult spends about $400 a year on lottery games. But while the interest in the lottery is constantly increasing and at a rapid pace, the odds of winning are growing smaller and smaller. No matter how many times you play or how much money you bet, your extremely small chances of winning do not increase.

This is because the rules of probability dictate your chances of winning. Each lottery ticket has an independent probability; thus, they all have the same odds of winning, and they are very low.

To provide you with real numbers, your odds of winning the jackpot in a Powerball drawing are 1 in 292.2 million.

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This means you have much higher odds, 1 in 186,978, of dying from a lightning strike in a given year and an even higher chance, 1 in 39,192, of dying in a cataclysmic storm in your lifetime. Yet, most people believe that the likelihood of having any of these misfortunes is pretty low.  

But not only is it far more likely to be killed by a shark or die by a meteorite than winning the jackpot, prizes account for about 50%-60% of lottery receipts.

So, from an investment perspective, they are pretty horrible bets. Still, people come in droves to these lottery games, which are becoming more and more attractive with eye-popping, newsworthy prizes that are becoming harder and harder to win.

In comparison, a solo miner has much higher odds, approximately 1 in 36,000 per day, of winning the chance to mine a block to earn Bitcoin, an asset whose price has gone up 165,405% over the last 12 years, even in today’s highly competitive and advanced crypto mining space.

Solo Mining: What the Odds Really Mean

Recently, a solo Bitcoin miner exemplified the higher odds of mining a Bitcoin block.

This past weekend, the miner solved a block and took home the reward of a full BTC subsidy plus the transaction fee. The block 913,593 was mined using solo bitcoin-mining software from CKpool, as per the data from Bitcoin explorer Mempool.

For this block, the miner collected a total reward of 3.129 BTC (worth $347,980), which involves 3.125 BTC in block subsidy and 0.004 BTC in transaction fees.

“Congratulations to miner bc1q~jr38 for solving the 307th solo block at solo.ckpool.org, with only 200TH!. A miner of this size only has a 1 in ~36,000 chance of solving a block each day, or once every ~100 years!”

– Con Kolivas, the developer of CKpool on X (formerly Twitter)

The hashrate of 200TH is equivalent to just one Antminer S21 from crypto mining hardware provider Bitmain, which is air-cooled with four high-speed fans and consumes about 3,500 W of power. It costs about $3K and claims profitability of $2.54/day.

The hashpower of the solo miner, meanwhile, represents a very tiny percentage (0.00002%) of the Bitcoin network’s total hashrate, which stands above 1 ZettaHash per second (ZH/s), which is a trillion times larger than a terahash.

The biggest public Bitcoin miner, MARA Holdings Inc (NASDAQ: MARA), in comparison, manages a hashrate of about 59.4 exahashes per second EH/s, as reported in its Bitcoin Production and Mining Operation Updates for August 2025.

With this hashrate, MARA accounts for 5.54% of Bitcoin network power as of Sept. 10, 2025, with Foundry USA leading with a 29.57% share, according to Hashrate Index. The second-highest share of Bitcoin’s hash rate is of ‘Others’ at 18.90%, which comprises many smaller mining pools or independent miners who don’t have enough hash power individually to show up in the chart.

This shows the massive competition smaller Bitcoin miners face, who usually join other independent miners to form a pool in order to increase their chances of earning steady rewards. 

Those mining all by themselves have an extremely low chance of winning a block, but as we have seen time and again, they try and, at times, win a shot at the full block reward.

Another example of this is that of a solo miner beating the odds back in 2022. With a hashrate of a mere 126 terahashes per second (TH/s), the Bitcoin miner successfully mined the 718,124 block and earned 6.25 BTC block reward (worth $260K at then BTC prices) plus about 0.1 BTC in transaction fee. The miner controlled only 0.000073% of the total bitcoin hash rate at the time. 

Much like the recent one, this lucky miner was also part of the solo mining pool operated by ckpool, which means miners use their own equipment for mining blocks but don’t run the Bitcoin blockchain; rather, the pool does so on their behalf, for which it takes a 2% fee from the rewards earned.

“For the miner involved it’s a once in a lifetime chance. Last time a miner this small solved a block on my pool was only a year ago, though. It’s usually larger miners that solve blocks statistically, but there is no reason even the smallest miner can’t solve one,” posted the developer Kolivas at the time.

So, this shows that while the hashing potential of major miners is constantly on the rise, it’s possible for smaller and individual miners to contribute to Bitcoin’s security and earn rewards. But how can one do that?

How Bitcoin Mining Works (Quick Primer)

Built on blockchain technology, Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency that doesn’t have a single central entity in control of it. Operating on a peer-to-peer network, it enables users to interact directly with each other without going through intermediaries.

It is the world’s largest cryptocurrency with a market capitalization of over $2.2 trillion, which puts it at the 8th spot among all assets, including public companies, precious metals, cryptocurrencies, and ETFs.

At the time of writing, BTC/USD is trading at around $113,000, up 20% YTD and down 8.2% from its all-time high (ATH) above $124,000 that was hit less than a month ago.

This marks a massive uptrend since Bitcoin’s early days, when it was worth nothing. Bitcoin had a price of zero when it was introduced sixteen years ago. 

Determined by the demand and supply dynamics, BTC price went past $1 in 2011, surpassed both $100 as well as the $1,000 mark in 2013, and hit $19K in 2017. The 2020 bull run saw Bitcoin’s price eclipse $60K and finally break the $100,000 barrier in 2024.

This rally has been driven by mainstream investors, institutions, corporations, and even governments taking notice and adopting Bitcoin, also known as digital gold. As Bitcoin’s decentralization, transparency, and security gained traction, its price began to reflect that adoption. 

Originally, it was designed to be a payment method as shared in the paper titled ‘Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System’, which was authored by its pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, and released in August 2008 to describe “a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust.”

In early Jan. 2009, the network officially went live with the mining of Bitcoin’s genesis block. The original block had a reward of 50 BTC, which has since gone down to the current 3.125 BTC as a result of four halvings, which occur after 210,000 blocks or about four years.

The next halving is scheduled to occur in 2028, which will reduce rewards to 1.5625 BTC. By 2032, miners are expected to receive less than one BTC per block. The halving will continue until all 21 million BTC are mined. 94.85% of the BTC supply is already circulating in the market.

Bitcoin rewards are earned by miners who successfully mine a block, which stores verified transaction data and links to other blocks in the chain. Each block contains a hash created from its contents and the previous block’s hash.

These blocks are added to Bitcoin’s proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain, which mints new tokens and validates as well as records the latest batch of transactions, including information and processing fees, through the complex process called mining that requires special hardware and sophisticated technical skills.

In this process, initiated and unverified transactions are grouped into a pool, and some or all of them are then bundled to form a block. If a lot of transactions are waiting for verification, the miner can prioritize the ones based on size, age, or fee.

Now, miners race to mine the block, i.e., get a chance to put it on the blockchain. For this, they compete to solve a complex mathematical puzzle, which requires finding a specific number that produces a hash when combined with the block’s data. 

The first one to find the correct number and create a valid hash gets to broadcast it on the blockchain. The accuracy is verified by other miners, and once consensus is achieved by the miners, the solution is confirmed correct, and a new block is added to the blockchain.

The correct hash, first broadcast by the miner, allows it to process the transactions in the block. As the block is added, transactions are confirmed, and the miner receives fees and the Bitcoin reward, which mints new tokens.

Click here to learn why investing in Bitcoin is a good idea.

Mining Economics: Costs, Difficulty, and Power

Bitcoin mining offers an enticing opportunity to earn rewards and contribute to a powerful, open network. This, however, requires specialized computing hardware, which is expensive, and low-cost electricity to turn a profit. 

In the early days, one could mine Bitcoin on their regular computers. It didn’t take much to get your hands on the new BTC; just a computer and a decent internet connection.

People were starting to earn real income through mining, but as the price of Bitcoin surged, so did its attractiveness. To have a better chance at adding the block, miners turned from CPUs to GPUs, which began the era of industrial mining. 

Today, application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) machines, which are equipped with specialized chips, have become the norm as they allow for faster and more efficient Bitcoin mining.

As more and more miners joined the Bitcoin network to win rewards, it led to an increase in hashrate, which is the total computational power dedicated by miners. Recently, it broke the one zetahash per second (Z/s) milestone, despite declining fees, shrinking revenues, and rising difficulty.

Bitcoin’s mining difficulty shows just how difficult it is to find the right hash for each block. It is currently sitting at its peak of 136.04 T, with the next one estimated to further increase it to 145.50 T.

This adjustment that happens every two weeks ensures that Bitcoin’s block times average about ten minutes. If computational power is taken off Bitcoin’s network, the difficulty adjusts downward, making it easier to mine.

Then there’s the mining cost, which is currently estimated to be about $99,000 per BTC.

This includes electricity to run mining systems round the clock and effective cooling solutions to prevent overheating as the systems generate a lot of heat. Then there’s the mining system itself. In order to be competitive and get the best chances to mine Bitcoin, one would need several ASIC miners, which can cost anywhere between $3K to $12K per rig. 

So, energy expenses make up a significant part of mining costs, which means proximity to low-cost electricity sources can considerably impact a miner’s profitability.

That is why companies with a lot of capital set up their farms in regions with low electricity costs and cooler climates. They even take advantage of renewable energy sources or surplus electricity to power their operations. Depending on the size of the operation, an individual site may host tens of thousands of rigs.

As crypto asset manager CoinShares noted, nine of the top Bitcoin mining companies collectively earned 9,800 BTC (worth $920 million) in Q1 2025.

Click here for a list of top Bitcoin mining stocks.

Rewards Beyond Money

With publicly listed mining firms earning 25-30% of total Bitcoin production, it has become very difficult to mine Bitcoin on your own if the goal is to get rich, as the odds are slim and the costs are high.

Still, as we have seen, solo miners have achieved success. The probability of successfully mining a block solo, while low, is actually significantly better than winning the Powerball jackpot. 

Besides offering better chances of earning digital gold, which enables investors to generate wealth, store value, and hedge against inflation and geopolitical uncertainty, mining Bitcoin provides consistent rewards, secures a decentralized network, promotes financial inclusion, and invests in your financial sovereignty.

Click here to learn all about investing in Bitcoin (BTC).