Talk about winning the lottery. A solo miner walked away with over $200,000 in Bitcoin while renting just $75 worth of hashing power.
A solo miner validated block 938,092 around 8:04 UTC Tuesday, earning the full block reward of 3,125 BTC using the hashrate rented through on-demand cloud services, according to blockchain data from Mempool.space.
The miner spent approximately 119,000 satoshis, or approximately $75, to rent 1 petahash per second of computing power and used CKPool, a service that allows individual miners to work independently while relying on a pool server to stream and submit solutions.
The calculation of this return is absurd. That’s a 2,600x win on what amounts to a lottery ticket with better odds than most real lotteries.
The Bitcoin network processes transactions by grouping them into blocks, which are added to the blockchain approximately every 10 minutes. Miners compete to solve a cryptographic puzzle for the right to add each block, and the winner collects the reward.
Competition is measured in hashrate, the amount of computing power a miner puts into the puzzle. More hashrate means more guesses per second and better odds.
Statistically rare
A solo miner renting 1 petahash is like bringing a slingshot to a gunfight. The chances of this single petahash solving a block before industrial operations are slim, roughly equivalent to finding a specific grain of sand on a beach.
But someone has to win every block, and probability doesn’t care about scale. As such, while solo-mined blocks remain statistically rare, they are no longer as rare as they once were.
Data from solo mining aggregator Bennet shows that 21 individual miners have successfully validated blocks over the past year, earning a total of 66 BTC worth $4.1 million at current prices. This represents a 17% increase in the number of solo blocks found year-over-year, with one landing approximately every 17 days on average.
The rise of on-demand hashrate rentals has lowered the barrier to entry.
Miners no longer need to own physical hardware to try their luck. Cloud-based services allow anyone to rent computing power for just a few dollars, transforming solo mining from an infrastructure-intensive operation into something closer to a scratch card with transparent odds.
Meanwhile, the lucky block landed at an interesting time for the Bitcoin mining economy.
Grid difficulties just climbed to 144.4 trillion after the latest adjustment, a 15% increase that reversed an 11% decline caused by severe winter storms in the United States earlier this month. This increase means that miners now need an average of 144.4 trillion hash attempts to find a valid block, compared to the very first blocks in 2009.
This storm-driven drop was the largest drop in hashrate since China’s 2021 mining ban, temporarily making blocks easier to find before the network recalibrates.
And for a miner with $75 and good timing, the window was enough.
