On Thursday, a solo bitcoin miner, operating with a computing power of approximately 230 terahashes per second, successfully validated block 943,411 and earned a reward of 3.139 BTC, valued at around $210,000. This achievement is notable, given that the miner's share of the total network hashrate is minuscule, virtually rounding to zero on most dashboards. The miner was connected to solo.ckpool.org, an anonymous solo mining pool established 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 a roughly 1-in-28,000 chance of finding a block on any given day. The winning miner, bc1qtt7cr9cxykyp9g4hq47zf5lq9t97cxvq72lun3, with a hashrate of ~230TH, solved the 312th solo block.
This achievement is significant, considering 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 is likely to be 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 with a hashrate of 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 just 20 bitcoin blocks over the past 12 months, distributing a combined 62.96 BTC, which translates to roughly one solo block every 18.7 days on average, with a longest gap of 58 days. This win continues a pattern that has repeated with surprising regularity throughout this cycle. 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, the output of a single old-generation ASIC, beat 1-in-180-million odds to land roughly $265,000.
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.