On Thursday, a solo bitcoin miner, operating with approximately 230 terahashes per second of computing power, successfully validated block 943,411, earning 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 imperceptible on most dashboards. The miner was connected to solo.ckpool.org, a solo mining pool established in 2014 that allows miners 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 discovering a block on any given day. The winning miner, bc1qtt7cr9cxykyp9g4hq47zf5lq9t97cxvq72lun3, with a hashrate of approximately 230 TH, solved the 312th solo block. This achievement marks the first solo win on CKpool since February 28, ending a 33-day drought. At 230 terahashes, the winning rig accounts for about 0.00002% of bitcoin's total estimated hashrate, which is roughly equivalent to a small setup of home-scale ASICs operating under one roof, rather than a large-scale industrial or cloud-based operation.
To put this into perspective, listed miner Riot Platforms alone operates over 30 exahashes, which is approximately 130,000 times the hashrate of Thursday's winner. 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 that has been observed with surprising regularity throughout this cycle.
In December, a miner with a hashrate of approximately 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 1 petahash at CKpool for a brief period.