In a surprising turn of events, a solo bitcoin miner, operating with approximately 230 terahashes per second of computing power, successfully validated block 943,411 on Thursday. This achievement earned the miner a block reward of 3.139 BTC, valued at around $210,000. Notably, the miner's share of the total network hashrate is so small that it is almost negligible on most dashboards. The miner was connected to solo.ckpool.org, a solo mining pool that was introduced in 2014 and 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 a roughly 1-in-28,000 chance of finding a block on any given day. This win marks the 312th solo block registered on CKpool since its inception and ends a 33-day drought.
The winning rig, operating at 230 terahashes, represents a minuscule 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 operation rather than a large industrial or cloud-based setup.
For perspective, listed miner Riot Platforms operates at over 30 exahashes, which is approximately 130,000 times the hashrate of Thursday's winner. The solo mining pool has found just 20 bitcoin blocks over the past 12 months, distributing a combined 62.96 BTC, which translates to roughly one solo block every 18.7 days on average.
This win continues a pattern of surprising solo mining successes, including a December win by a 270 TH/s miner that overcame 1-in-30,000 daily odds to claim a $284,633 reward, and a November win by a 6 TH/s miner that beat 1-in-180-million odds to land roughly $265,000.