On Thursday, a solo bitcoin miner, operating with approximately 230 terahashes per second of computing power, successfully validated block 943,411 and earned a reward of 3.139 BTC, valued at around $210,000. Notably, this miner's share of the total network hashrate was so small that it is effectively 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 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.
This achievement is particularly impressive given that the miner's hashrate represents about 0.00002% of bitcoin's total estimated hashrate of roughly 1 zetahash per second as of early April. The winning rig's output is consistent with a small-scale home operation rather than an industrial or cloud-based setup.
For comparison, listed miner Riot Platforms operates with a hashrate of over 30 exahashes, which is approximately 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, 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 of surprising regularity in solo mining successes.
Previous notable wins include 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. Additionally, in late February, a miner turned approximately $75 of rented cloud hashrate into a $200,000 reward by pointing just 1 petahash at CKpool for a few hours.