A lone Bitcoin miner running about 6 terahashes per second of hashing power — an amount so small that it’s barely registered on the network — mined a full BTC block on Friday, earning 3,146 BTC plus fees worth nearly $265,000.
The exploit was confirmed by Solo CK pool creator Con Kolivas, who noted that the miner had “only a 1 in 180 million chance” of solving a block on a given day.
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The winning miner controls only 0.0000007% of the total hashing power of the Bitcoin network, which recently reached a record 855.7 exahashes per second.
This block is the 308th mined via CKpool since the software launched in 2014, and the first in approximately three months. CKpool allows miners to mine solo while using the pool 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 beats a probability of about 1 in 1.3 million to obtain a block, but the magnitude of Friday’s gap between miner size and network hashrate makes the latter outcome much more unlikely.
The winning wallet had submitted shares to the pool as usual, but with only 6 TH/s – the type of hashrate produced by a single legacy ASIC – the miner would not normally expect to find a block over hundreds of years of continuous mining.
Solo mining has become increasingly rare as Bitcoin’s hashrate increases, making the network more secure but reducing the likelihood that smaller miners will be able to capture a block.
