A lone Bitcoin miner running about 6 terahashes per second of hashing power (an amount so small it barely registers on the network) mined an entire block of BTC on Friday, earning 3,146 BTC plus fees worth nearly $265,000.
The feat was confirmed by Solo CK group creator Con Kolivas, who noted that the miner had “only a one in 180 million chance” of solving a block on any given day.
Charging…
The winning miner controls just 0.0000007% of the total hash power of the Bitcoin network, which recently hit a record high of 855.7 exahashes per second.
The block is the 308th mined through CKpool since the software was launched in 2014, and the first in about three months. CKpool allows miners to mine solo while using the pool’s infrastructure, meaning the winning address keeps the entire block reward minus a 2% fee.
Friday’s win is one of the luckiest solo mined blocks in recent memory. In 2022, a solo miner with 126 TH/s beat roughly 1 in 1.3 million odds to secure a block, but the scale of Friday’s gap between miner size and network hashrate makes the latter outcome much more unlikely.
The winning wallet had sent shares to the pool as usual, but with only 6 TH/s (the type of hashrate produced by a single old-generation ASIC), the miner would not normally expect to find a block in hundreds of years of continuous mining.
Solo mining has become increasingly rare as Bitcoin’s hash rate increases, making the network more secure but reducing the likelihood that small miners will be able to capture a block.
