On Thursday, a solo bitcoin miner, operating with approximately 230 terahashes per second of computing power, successfully validated block 943,411, earning a block 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 infinitesimally small, rounding to zero on most dashboards.
The miner was connected to solo.ckpool.org, an anonymous solo mining pool that has been operational since 2014 and deducts a 2% fee from the block rewards. 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 approximately 230 TH, solved the 312th solo block.
At 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-scale, home-based operation using ASICs, rather than a large-scale industrial or cloud-based operation. For comparison, listed miner Riot Platforms 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, ending a 33-day drought. Over the past 12 months, solo pools have found just 20 bitcoin blocks, distributing a combined 62.96 BTC, averaging one solo block every 18.7 days, with the longest gap being 58 days. This win continues a pattern that has repeated with surprising regularity throughout this cycle, with similar instances occurring in December and November, where miners defied significant odds to claim substantial rewards.