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. This achievement is remarkable given the miner's minimal share of the total network hashrate, which is nearly negligible on most dashboards. The miner was connected to solo.ckpool.org, an anonymous 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, noting 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 approximately 230 TH, solved the 312th solo block. At 230 terahashes, the winning rig represents a minuscule 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 setup of home-scale ASICs operating under a single roof, rather than a large industrial operation or rented cloud burst. For context, listed miner Riot Platforms alone operates at over 30 exahashes, which is roughly 130,000 times the hashrate of Thursday's winner.
The block marks the 312th solo win registered on CKpool since its inception and the first since February 28, ending a 33-day drought. Solo pools have found just 20 bitcoin blocks over the past 12 months, distributing a combined 62.96 BTC, which averages out to one solo block every 18.7 days, with the longest gap being 58 days. This win continues a pattern that has repeated with surprising regularity.
In December, a roughly 270 TH/s miner overcame 1-in-30,000 daily odds to claim a $284,633 reward. In November, a miner running just 6 TH/s beat 1-in-180-million odds to land roughly $265,000. Additionally, in late February, a miner transformed approximately $75 of rented cloud hashrate into a $200,000 reward by directing just 1 petahash at CKpool for a few hours.