Solo Bitcoin Miner Beats the Odds, Winning $282K Reward

In brief

• A solo Bitcoin miner notched a Bitcoin block reward of 3.13 BTC, valued around $282,000, on Thursday.
• The miner used Solo CKPool, a service designed to help solo miners win Bitcoin blocks.
• Solo mining continues to become more difficult, as Bitcoin’s hash rate or network computational power, increases year-over-year.

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A solo Bitcoin miner netted a reward of 3.13 BTC, valued at around $282,000, on Thursday.

The feat had odds of around 1 in 30,000 in happening, according to the administrator of CK Pool, the service used by the miner, which is designed to help solo miners win blocks.

“Congratulations to miner 1Ng9~VoQz with 270TH for solving the 311th solo block at solo.ckpool.org,” the pseudonymous developer and pool administrator wrote on X.

To use the pool, miners pay a 2% fee—about 0.062 BTC (around $5,734) in this case—to the service when they win blocks, but they do not need to incur the overhead of running a full, expensive Bitcoin mining rig.

The latest block victory was the fourth in the last three weeks for Solo CK Pool-powered miners. Prior to that, you’d have to go back to September to find the latest Solo CK block reward, according to data from mempool.space.

Solo CK Pool miners have now earned 5,553 BTC in total for their mining efforts, a total sum of around $511 million at current prices.

However, while solo miners can sometimes strike gold and earn their own block, experts told Decrypt earlier this year that mining without the support of a big pool “is like playing the lottery.”

The statement is especially true as Bitcoin’s hashrate, or the total computational power of the network continues to increase—now averaging more than 1 ZH/S in the last 24 hours, up from around 736 EH/S on this day last year.

Mining Bitcoin, or other proof-of-work cryptocurrencies, requires that miners spend exorbitant computational power to solve complex mathematical equations. In order to solve these equations, it takes a lot of power and energy, and special hardware that can be costly.

As a reward, miners are given freshly minted Bitcoin—currently 3.125 BTC, along with user fees from the mined block.

As the economics of Bitcoin mining shift, some publicly traded mining firms are shifting priorities towards powering the AI boom—or opting out of the Bitcoin business altogether. In November, publicly traded firm Bitfarms announced it would wind down its Bitcoin mining operation after a $46 million loss in order to focus on providing computefor the burgeoning AI industry.

Bitcoin is flat in the last 24 hours, recently changing hands at $90,062.