On Thursday, a solo bitcoin miner, operating with approximately 230 terahashes per second of computing 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 is so minimal that it is effectively 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, 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. At 230 terahashes, the winning rig accounts for about 0.00002% of bitcoin's total estimated hashrate of roughly 1 zetahash per second as of early April, consistent with a small setup of home-scale ASICs rather than a large industrial operation. In comparison, listed miner Riot Platforms alone operates over 30 exahashes, approximately 130,000 times the hashrate of Thursday's winner. This block marks the 312th solo win on CKpool since its inception and the first since February 28, ending a 33-day drought.
Solo pools have discovered just 20 bitcoin blocks over the past 12 months, distributing a combined 62.96 BTC, averaging about one solo block every 18.7 days, with the longest gap being 58 days. The win continues a pattern that has repeated with surprising regularity, including a roughly 270 TH/s miner clearing 1-in-30,000 daily odds to claim a $284,633 reward in December, and a miner running just 6 TH/s beating 1-in-180-million odds to land roughly $265,000 in November.