In an astonishing turn of events, a solo bitcoin miner, operating at approximately 230 terahashes per second, successfully validated block 943,411 on Thursday, earning 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 virtually undetectable on most dashboards. The miner in question was connected to solo.ckpool.org, a solo mining pool launched 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 a mere 1-in-28,000 chance of discovering a block on any given day.

The winning miner, identified as bc1qtt7cr9cxykyp9g4hq47zf5lq9t97cxvq72lun3, achieved this feat with a relatively modest setup of about 230TH. For context, this represents a tiny fraction, approximately 0.00002%, of bitcoin's total estimated hashrate of roughly 1 zetahash per second as of early April.

This level of output is consistent with a small, home-scale operation utilizing ASICs, rather than a large-scale industrial or cloud-based setup. To put this into perspective, Riot Platforms, a listed miner, operates at a hashrate of 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. This translates to an average of 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. In December, a miner operating at approximately 270 TH/s overcame 1-in-30,000 daily odds to claim a $284,633 reward. Similarly, in November, a miner with a mere 6 TH/s, equivalent to the output of a single old-generation ASIC, defied 1-in-180-million odds to land a reward of roughly $265,000.

Furthermore, in late February, a miner successfully converted approximately $75 of rented cloud hashrate into a $200,000 reward by directing just 1 petahash at CKpool for a brief period.