On Thursday, a solo bitcoin miner, operating at approximately 230 terahashes per second, 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 is minimal, almost negligible.
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, allowing operators to retain the majority of their block rewards. Con Kolivas, the developer of CKpool, confirmed the win, highlighting the miner's extremely low odds of finding a block, at about 1 in 28,000 per day. The winning miner, bc1qtt7cr9cxykyp9g4hq47zf5lq9t97cxvq72lun3, achieved this feat with a relatively modest setup of ~230TH, solving the 312th solo block. For perspective, this setup represents a tiny fraction, about 0.00002%, of bitcoin's estimated total hashrate of roughly 1 zetahash per second as of early April.
This output is consistent with a small, home-scale operation rather than an industrial or cloud-based setup. In contrast, listed miner Riot Platforms operates at a significantly larger scale, with over 30 exahashes, which is roughly 130,000 times the hashrate of Thursday's winner.
This solo win marks the 312th block found by CKpool since its inception and the first since February 28, ending a 33-day drought. Over the past 12 months, solo pools have discovered just 20 bitcoin blocks, distributing a combined total of 62.96 BTC, averaging about one solo block every 18.7 days, with the longest gap being 58 days. This win continues a surprising pattern of solo miners overcoming significant odds to claim substantial rewards.
Previous instances include a 270 TH/s miner claiming a $284,633 reward in December, despite 1-in-30,000 daily odds, and a 6 TH/s miner beating 1-in-180-million odds to earn roughly $265,000 in November. Additionally, in late February, a miner converted approximately $75 of rented cloud hashrate into a $200,000 reward by directing just 1 petahash at CKpool for a short period.