NiceHash Team Gold finds Bitcoin block 972,373 with rented hashpower

On October 20, 2026 at 20:25 UTC a Team Gold round on NiceHash EasyMining found Bitcoin block 972,373. Eighteen people who together held 100 shares split the reward. None of them owned a single ASIC: the whole round ran on rented hashpower.

What the block paid

According to Blocksrace, the block paid 3.16807302 BTC: the 3.125 BTC subsidy plus 0.04307302 BTC in fees from 3,726 transactions. At the BTC price NiceHash used, $82,536, that is about $261,480.

Who got what

• The team address received 3.07303083 BTC, about $253,636.
• A second address received 0.09504219 BTC, exactly 3% of the reward. Blocksrace believes this is the NiceHash fee. For a Team Gold block in June it was about 1%.
• At a 1% fee the team would have received 3.13639229 BTC, so the difference is 0.0634 BTC, roughly $5,230.
• Each of the 100 shares brought about 0.0307 BTC, around $2,536.

NiceHash wrote on X that a share cost about $8.35 and returned about 0.031 BTC. The whole team spent roughly $835, so every share paid back about 300 times. One technical detail: the block carries no /NiceHash/ tag, so mempool.space lists its pool as "Unknown".

How Team Gold and Solo packages work

EasyMining sells packages of rented hashpower that try to find a whole block on their own. Besides BTC, packages exist for BCH, LTC, DOGE, ZEC and KAS, and some BTC and BCH packages start from 5 USDT. In a Solo package one buyer pays for everything and takes the whole reward. In a Team package many buyers pool their shares into one round and split the block by shares. If the round ends without a block, the money is gone.

The odds are shown before you buy. NiceHash calculates them with a Poisson model, P = 1 − e^(−λ), where λ is the expected number of blocks during the package lifetime. On October 22 the Solo Gold L package cost 0.01 BTC, ran for about 4 hours and had a chance of 1 in 321, about 0.3%.

Why this is still a lottery

Our own rough estimate from those published odds: 1/321 × 3.168 BTC ≈ 0.0099 BTC of expected reward for a 0.01 BTC ticket. In other words, on average you get back about what you paid, and a 3% fee on the win pushes the result slightly below zero. That is not a mining income, it is a bet with a fair but thin edge for the house.

Variance is huge. The previous Team Gold block, 955,381, was found on June 25, 117 days earlier, and Blocksrace calls this the longest wait so far. On the other side, NiceHash reported on October 2 that in September one miner found blocks 967,911 and 967,915 with Gold L Solo packages, collecting more than 6 BTC in total.

Where the hashpower comes from

EasyMining sits on top of the hashrate rental market. For scale, the SHA-256 market on Mining Rig Rentals showed on October 31, 2026 at 9:13 AM: 289 rigs available with 3.02 EH/s, 105 rigs rented with 32.38 PH/s, a last price of 0.00062 BTC per PH per day and 3,562 rentals in 30 days by 370 unique renters.

Takeaways

• Block 972,373 shows that a group of small buyers can hit a full Bitcoin block with rented hashpower.
• By the published odds, the expected return of a Gold L ticket is close to its price, so treat it as a lottery, not as passive income.
• Check the current fee before buying: on this block it was 3%, not 1%.
• Packages can be cancelled, and NiceHash refunds the unused remainder.