On Thursday, a solo bitcoin miner, operating at approximately 230 terahashes per second, successfully validated block 943,411 and earned 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 virtually negligible on most dashboards. The miner was connected to solo.ckpool.org, an anonymous solo mining pool launched in 2014, which allows operators 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 approximately a 1-in-28,000 chance of finding a block on any given day.
This achievement marks the 312th solo block win registered on CKpool since its inception and ends a 33-day drought, with the previous solo win occurring on February 28. The winning rig, operating at 230 terahashes, represents a mere 0.00002% of bitcoin's estimated total hashrate of roughly 1 zetahash per second as of early April, suggesting that the setup likely consists of a small number of home-scale ASICs running under a single roof rather than a large-scale industrial operation.
In contrast, listed miner Riot Platforms alone operates at over 30 exahashes, which is roughly 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 approximately 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, with similar instances of unlikely wins occurring in December, November, and late February, where miners overcame significant odds to claim substantial rewards.