A solo bitcoin miner running about 230 terahashes per second of computing power validated block 943,411 on Thursday, pocketing 3,139 BTC worth about $210,000 despite controlling a portion of the network’s total hashrate so small it rounds to zero on most dashboards.
The miner was connected to solo.ckpool.org, the anonymous individual mining pool introduced in 2014 that allows operators to keep their entire block rewards minus a 2% fee. CKpool developer Con Kolivas confirmed the win on
With 230 terahashes, the winning platform represents about 0.00002% of the total estimated bitcoin hashrate of about 1 zetahash per second as of early April. That result is consistent with a small stack of home-scale ASICs running under one roof rather than in a rented cloud or industrial operation.
For context, publicly traded miner Riot Platforms alone runs more than 30 exahashes, roughly 130,000 times the hashrate of Thursday’s winner.
The ban is the 312th solo victory recorded on CKpool since its inception, and the first since February 28, ending a 33-day drought. Individual groups have found just 20 bitcoin blocks in the last 12 months, distributing a combined total of 62.96 BTC. That’s about one individual block every 18.7 days on average, with the longest interval being 58 days.
The victory continues a pattern that has repeated itself with surprising regularity throughout this cycle.
In December, a roughly 270 TH/s miner beat 1 in 30,000 daily odds to claim a $284,633 reward. In November, a miner running just 6 TH/s, producing a single old-generation ASIC that you wouldn’t normally expect to find a block in hundreds of years of continuous mining, beat 1 in 180 million odds and netted approximately $265,000.
And in late February, a miner converted approximately $75 of rented cloud hashrate into a $200,000 reward by pointing just 1 petahash to CKpool for a few hours.
