On Thursday, a solo bitcoin miner, operating with approximately 230 terahashes per second of computational power, successfully validated block 943,411, earning a reward of 3.139 BTC, valued at around $210,000. Notably, this miner's share of the total network hashrate was so minimal that it is virtually negligible on most dashboards. The miner was connected to solo.ckpool.org, a solo mining pool introduced in 2014 that 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 roughly a 1-in-28,000 chance of discovering a block on any given day.
This achievement marks the 312th solo block win registered on CKpool since its inception and ends a 33-day drought, with the previous solo win occurring on February 28. The winning rig, operating at 230 terahashes, represents a mere 0.00002% of bitcoin's estimated total hashrate of approximately 1 zetahash per second as of early April.
This output is consistent with a small-scale, home-based operation utilizing ASICs, rather than a large-scale industrial or cloud-based operation. For perspective, listed miner Riot Platforms alone operates at over 30 exahashes, roughly 130,000 times the hashrate of Thursday's winner. Over the past 12 months, solo pools have discovered a total of 20 bitcoin blocks, distributing a combined 62.96 BTC, averaging approximately one solo block every 18.7 days, with the longest gap being 58 days.
This win continues a pattern that has been observed with surprising regularity throughout this cycle, with other notable instances including a 270 TH/s miner claiming a $284,633 reward in December, despite facing 1-in-30,000 daily odds, and a 6 TH/s miner beating 1-in-180-million odds to earn approximately $265,000 in November.