On Thursday, a solo bitcoin miner, operating with approximately 230 terahashes per second of computing power, successfully validated block 943,411 and received a reward of 3.139 BTC, valued at around $210,000. Notably, this miner's share of the total network hashrate is so minimal that it is often rounded to zero on most dashboards.
The miner was connected to solo.ckpool.org, an anonymous solo mining pool launched in 2014, which allows operators to retain their full block rewards minus a 2% fee. Con Kolivas, the developer of CKpool, confirmed the win on social media, highlighting that the miner had a roughly 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 a miner of this size has a 1 in ~28k chance per day of solving a block.
The winning rig, operating at 230 terahashes, represents about 0.00002% of bitcoin's total estimated hashrate of roughly 1 zetahash per second as of early April. This output is consistent with a small setup of home-scale ASICs running under a single roof, rather than a rented cloud burst or industrial operation. For context, listed miner Riot Platforms alone operates over 30 exahashes, which is roughly 130,000 times the hashrate of Thursday's winner. The block is the 312th solo win registered on CKpool since its inception and the first since February 28, ending a 33-day drought.
Solo pools have found just 20 bitcoin blocks over the past 12 months, distributing a combined 62.96 BTC, which translates to roughly one solo block every 18.7 days on average, with the longest gap being 58 days. This win continues a pattern that has repeated with surprising regularity through this cycle.
In December, a roughly 270 TH/s miner cleared 1-in-30,000 daily odds to claim a $284,633 reward. In November, a miner running just 6 TH/s, the output of a single old-generation ASIC, beat 1-in-180-million odds to land roughly $265,000. Additionally, in late February, a miner turned approximately $75 of rented cloud hashrate into a $200,000 reward by pointing just 1 petahash at CKpool for a few hours.