On Thursday, a solo bitcoin miner, operating with approximately 230 terahashes per second of computing power, successfully validated block 943,411 and earned 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 was connected to solo.ckpool.org, a solo mining pool that has been in operation since 2014 and 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 roughly 1-in-28,000 chance of finding a block on any given day. This achievement marks the 312th solo block win registered on CKpool since its inception and ends a 33-day drought. The winning rig, operating at 230 terahashes, 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-scale, home-based operation utilizing ASICs, rather than a large-scale industrial or cloud-based setup. For comparison, 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. The solo win is part of a recurring pattern, with previous instances including a 270 TH/s miner clearing 1-in-30,000 daily odds to claim a $284,633 reward in December, and a 6 TH/s miner beating 1-in-180-million odds to land roughly $265,000 in November.
These unexpected wins underscore the unpredictable nature of solo mining and the potential for significant rewards, even for smaller-scale operations.