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 was so minimal that it is virtually negligible on most dashboards. The miner was connected to solo.ckpool.org, a solo mining pool that has been in operation since 2014 and allows miners to retain their full block rewards, minus a 2% fee.

The pool's developer, Con Kolivas, confirmed the win on social media, highlighting that the miner had approximately a 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, 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-scale, home-based operation using ASICs, rather than a large-scale industrial or cloud-based setup.

For context, listed miner Riot Platforms alone operates at 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 marks the first win 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 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 running at just 6 TH/s, which is equivalent to the output of a single old-generation ASIC, beat 1-in-180-million odds to land 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.