Mining is a lottery with known odds.

Every mining calculator shows you the average. The Luck Lab shows you the distribution — how long you'll actually wait for a solo block, what your month of pool payouts really looks like, and what happens when the network doubles overnight. All math is the memoryless Poisson model; all chain numbers come from the live Quantus indexer (snapshot fallback when it won't talk to your browser).

Nothing here is financial advice. Luck has no memory: a long drought never makes a block "due".

Network pulse

The numbers every calculation below is anchored to. loading…

Mining difficulty—expected hashes per block

Network hashrate—difficulty ÷ 12 s

Block reward now—R = (21M − total issuance) / 50M

Blocks / day—from recent block times

Solo luck — how long until your block?

Your miner finds blocks as a memoryless Poisson process at rate h / D per second. The wait is exponential with mean D / h — the median wait is only 69% of the mean, and 1 in 10 miners wait more than 2.3× the average.

Your hashrate Quick set Simulation trials

Expected wait—the "average" everyone quotes

Median wait—half of miners beat this

Lucky 10% by—1 in 10 finds one this fast

Unlucky 10% after—1 in 10 still waiting here

1% tail by—99 of 100 found one by now

Blocks / day (you)—your mean block rate

Probability tool

Chance of finding at least one solo block within…

Time window

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P(≥1 block) = 1 − e^−t/E. At your expected wait E, the chance is 63.2% — not 100%.

Drought odds

The chance your wait runs longer than a multiple of the average.

Drought	Chance it happens	One in…

This is not a malfunction — it is the exponential distribution doing its job.

Wait-time distribution Monte Carlo

Simulated solo waits (seeded, reproducible). The gold line is the mean everyone quotes; the green line is the median you should plan around.

Memoryless means merciless. After waiting the full expected time with no block, your chance of finding one in the next hour is exactly the same as it was at the start. Past droughts never "use up" bad luck — and past hot streaks never spend good luck either.

Pool variance — the smoothing machine

A fair pool pays you your proportional share of every block it finds, minus fees. The expected income equals solo mining minus the fee — but the variance collapses: instead of rare jackpots you get a steady drip. The simulator below runs real day-by-day draws.

Your hashrate Pool fee % Simulated period

Expected / day—fair-proportional, after fee

Expected / period—after fee

Simulated p10 – p90—daily earnings, 80% band

Your share of networkh / H_net

Daily earnings: solo vs pool Monte Carlo

Same hashrate, same period — one histogram per strategy. Solo is a spike at zero with rare jackpots; the pool is a bell around the mean.

Solo daily QTCPool daily QTC (1% fee)

Honest model boundaries. This is a fair-proportional pool with zero stale shares and instant payouts — real pools add PPLNS-window noise, payout thresholds, and occasional downtime, all of which widen the band a little. The shape of the answer (pool smooths, fee costs) does not change.

Difficulty-shock scenarios

What if the network hashrate jumps today? Difficulty retargets every block (max +1/2048 up, −99/2048 down), so it chases the new reality — fast on the way down, slow on the way up. Your solo expected wait is recomputed at the new steady state.

Network hashrate	Your solo expected wait	Difficulty catch-up

Catch-up assumes the full per-block step is used every block (worst case for miners on the way up). Your expected wait depends only on difficulty and your own hashrate — the network's size matters through difficulty, not directly.

Method, formulas & sources

The math

Solo block finds: Poisson process, rate λ = h/D per second.
Expected wait E = D/h; luck quantile t_p = −E·ln(1−p).
P(≥1 block in t) = 1 − e^−t/E; P(wait > k·E) = e^−k.
Your blocks/day ~ Poisson(h·86400/D); pool blocks/day ~ Poisson(blocks/day).
Retarget catch-up: ×r up → ⌈2048·ln r⌉ blocks; ×r down → ⌈ln r / ln(1−99/2048)⌉ blocks.
Block reward: exact on-chain R = (21,000,000 − total issuance) / 50,000,000.

Honest caveats

Difficulty, network hashrate, and reward are snapshots — they move every block.
No orphan/stale rate, no pool downtime, no fee tiers beyond the one you set.
QTC has no liquid market price used here — figures are in QTC, not dollars.
Simulations are seeded and reproducible, not predictions.

Chain numbers: live-first GraphQL against the public Quantus Subsquid indexer (sqm.quantus.com), falling back to the builder's same-origin snapshots data/consensus.json + data/supply.json (refreshed 2026-10-02). Difficulty semantics verified against pallet_qpow in Quantus-Network/chain — see the Consensus Lab.