On Thursday, a solo bitcoin miner, operating with approximately 230 terahashes per second of computational power, successfully validated block 943,411, earning a reward of 3.139 BTC, valued at around $210,000. This achievement is notable given the miner's minimal share of the total network hashrate, which is virtually undetectable on most monitoring platforms.
The miner was connected to solo.ckpool.org, an anonymous solo mining pool launched in 2014 that allows miners to retain their full block rewards, minus a 2% fee. Con Kolivas, the developer of CKpool, confirmed the win, 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 terahashes, solved the 312th solo block. This achievement is significant, considering the miner's hashrate represents only about 0.00002% of bitcoin's total estimated hashrate of roughly 1 zetahash per second as of early April.
For comparison, listed miner Riot Platforms operates with 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 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 approximately 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. 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, the output of a single old-generation ASIC, beat 1-in-180-million odds to earn roughly $265,000. Additionally, in late February, a miner transformed approximately $75 of rented cloud hashrate into a $200,000 reward by directing just 1 petahash at CKpool for a few hours.