On Thursday, a solo bitcoin miner, operating with a modest 230 terahashes per second of computing power, successfully validated block 943,411, earning a block reward of 3.139 BTC, valued at approximately $210,000. Notably, this miner's share of the total network hashrate was so small that it is nearly negligible 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, highlighting that the miner had roughly a 1-in-28,000 chance of finding a block on any given day. The winning miner, identified as 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 rented cloud burst or industrial operation.

For perspective, listed miner Riot Platforms alone operates with more than 30 exahashes, which is roughly 130,000 times the hashrate of Thursday's winner. The block marks 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, 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 repeated with surprising regularity in 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 with just 6 TH/s, equivalent to the output of a single old-generation ASIC, beat 1-in-180-million odds to earn roughly $265,000.

Furthermore, in late February, a miner converted approximately $75 of rented cloud hashrate into a $200,000 reward by directing just 1 petahash at CKpool for a few hours.