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 share of the network’s total hashrate so small that it’s rounded to zero on most dashboards.
The miner was connected to solo.ckpool.org, the anonymous solo mining pool introduced in 2014 that allows operators to keep their entire block rewards minus a 2% fee. CKpool developer Con Kolivas confirmed the victory over X, noting that the miner had about a 1 in 28,000 chance of finding a block on a given day.
At 230 terahashes, the winning rig represents about 0.00002% of Bitcoin’s total estimated hashrate, or about 1 zetahash per second as of early April. This result is consistent with a small, home-scale ASIC stack operating under a single roof rather than a rented cloud burst or industrial operation.
As a reminder, publicly traded miner Riot Platforms alone manages more than 30 exahashes, or around 130,000 times the hashrate of Thursday’s winner.
This is the 312th solo win recorded on CKpool since its inception, and the first since February 28, ending a 33-day drought. Solo pools have only found 20 Bitcoin blocks in the last 12 months, distributing a total of 62.96 BTC. That’s about one solo block every 18.7 days on average, with a longest interval of 58 days.
This victory continues a trend that has repeated with surprising regularity throughout this cycle.
In December, a miner of around 270 TH/s reached a daily probability of 1 in 30,000 to claim a reward of $284,633. In November, a miner running at just 6 TH/s, or the output of a single old-generation ASIC that wouldn’t normally expect to find a block over hundreds of years of continuous mining, beat the odds of 1 in 180 million to land around $265,000.
And in late February, a miner turned around $75 worth of rented cloud hashrate into a $200,000 reward by pointing just 1 petahash to CKpool for a few hours.
