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 is so minimal that it is nearly undetectable 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 on social media, highlighting that the miner had roughly a 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 significant, given that a miner of this size has a mere 1 in 28,000 chance per day of solving a block. With a hashrate of 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. This output is consistent with a small setup of home-scale ASICs operating under a single roof, rather than a large-scale industrial operation or rented cloud burst.

For perspective, listed miner Riot Platforms alone operates over 30 exahashes, which is 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, ending 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. This 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 repeated with surprising regularity throughout this cycle. In December, a miner with a hashrate of roughly 270 TH/s overcame 1-in-30,000 daily odds to claim a $284,633 reward.

In November, a miner operating at just 6 TH/s, equivalent to the output of a single old-generation ASIC, defied 1-in-180-million odds to earn approximately $265,000. Furthermore, 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.