On Thursday, a solo bitcoin miner, operating with approximately 230 terahashes per second of computing power, successfully validated block 943,411 and earned a block reward of 3.139 BTC, valued at around $210,000. Notably, this miner's share of the total network hashrate is infinitesimally small, rounding to zero on most dashboards.
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 on social media, highlighting the miner's roughly 1-in-28,000 chance of finding a block on any given day. The winning miner, bc1qtt7cr9cxykyp9g4hq47zf5lq9t97cxvq72lun3, with a hashrate of approximately 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 a negligible 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-scale, home-based operation utilizing a few ASICs, rather than a large-scale industrial or cloud-based operation. For context, listed miner Riot Platforms alone operates at over 30 exahashes, which is approximately 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.
Over the past 12 months, solo pools have found just 20 bitcoin blocks, 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 throughout this cycle.
In December, a miner operating at approximately 270 TH/s overcame 1-in-30,000 daily odds to claim a $284,633 reward. In November, a miner with a hashrate of just 6 TH/s, equivalent to the output of a single old-generation ASIC, beat 1-in-180-million odds to earn approximately $265,000. Additionally, in late February, a miner successfully turned about $75 of rented cloud hashrate into a $200,000 reward by directing 1 petahash at CKpool for a few hours.