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 notable given the miner's relatively small contribution to the total network hashrate, which is barely perceptible 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, 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 a testament to the miner's luck, as a rig of this size has a 1 in 28,000 chance per day of solving a block.
The winning rig, operating at 230 terahashes, 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-scale, home-based operation, rather than a large industrial or cloud-based setup. For perspective, listed miner Riot Platforms alone operates at over 30 exahashes, roughly 130,000 times the hashrate of Thursday's winner.
The block is the 312th solo win registered on CKpool since its inception and the first since February 28, marking the end of a 33-day drought. Solo pools have found a total of 20 bitcoin blocks over the past 12 months, distributing a combined 62.96 BTC, which translates to approximately one solo block every 18.7 days on average, with the longest gap being 58 days. This win continues a pattern that has been observed with surprising regularity throughout this cycle.
In December, a miner operating at approximately 270 TH/s overcame 1-in-30,000 daily odds to claim a $284,633 reward. In November, a miner running at just 6 TH/s, which is equivalent to the output of a single old-generation ASIC, defied 1-in-180-million odds to earn approximately $265,000. Additionally, in late February, a miner successfully converted around $75 of rented cloud hashrate into a $200,000 reward by directing just 1 petahash at CKpool for a few hours.