An independent bitcoin miner, operating with approximately 230 terahashes per second of computing power, successfully validated block 943,411 on Thursday. This resulted in the miner receiving 3.139 BTC, valued at around $210,000, despite controlling a negligible share of the total network hashrate. The miner was connected to solo.ckpool.org, an anonymous solo mining pool established in 2014 that allows operators to retain their full block rewards, minus a 2% fee. The win was confirmed by CKpool developer Con Kolivas, who noted that the miner had roughly a 1-in-28,000 chance of finding a block on any given day.
This achievement marks the 312th solo block solved on CKpool and ends a 33-day drought. Notably, the winning rig represents about 0.00002% of bitcoin's total estimated hashrate, equivalent to a small-scale home operation rather than an industrial or cloud-based setup. For comparison, listed miner Riot Platforms operates at over 30 exahashes, roughly 130,000 times the hashrate of the winning miner.
The solo mining pool has found just 20 bitcoin blocks in the past 12 months, with a combined value of 62.96 BTC, averaging one solo block every 18.7 days. This win continues a pattern of surprising solo mining successes, including a 270 TH/s miner claiming 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.