On Thursday, a solo bitcoin miner, operating with approximately 230 terahashes per second of computational power, successfully validated block 943,411 and earned a reward of 3.139 BTC, valued at around $210,000. Notably, this miner controlled a negligible share of the total network hashrate, making their achievement all the more remarkable.
The miner was connected to solo.ckpool.org, an anonymous solo mining pool that has been in operation since 2014 and charges a 2% fee. Con Kolivas, the developer of CKpool, confirmed the win on social media, highlighting that the miner had only a 1-in-28,000 chance of finding a block on any given day.
The winning miner, bc1qtt7cr9cxykyp9g4hq47zf5lq9t97cxvq72lun3, with a hashrate of ~230TH, solved the 312th solo block. This achievement is significant, given that the miner's hashrate represents a mere 0.00002% of bitcoin's total estimated hashrate of roughly 1 zetahash per second as of early April. The winning rig is likely a small setup of home-scale ASICs, rather than a large industrial operation.
For comparison, listed miner Riot Platforms operates with over 30 exahashes, roughly 130,000 times the hashrate of Thursday's winner. This solo win marks the 312th block found by CKpool since its inception and ends a 33-day drought.
Over the past 12 months, solo pools have discovered just 20 bitcoin blocks, distributing a combined 62.96 BTC, averaging one solo block every 18.7 days. The win is part of a pattern that has repeated with surprising regularity, with similar upset wins occurring in December and November, where miners defied significant odds to claim substantial rewards.