Another Solo Bitcoin Miner Hits the Jackpot, Scoring $225K BTC Reward

A solo Bitcoin miner scored a major victory on Thursday, earning a BTC reward valued at more than $225,000 after solving a Bitcoin block. The block win came just a week after the last reported solo score, showing that individual miners can still succeed despite very long odds.

The miner had roughly 0.001% odds of achieving the feat based on their mining hash power of 70TH, the amount of computational power they deployed attempting to solve a Bitcoin block. At that level, the solo miner’s computational power represented just 0.00000667% of the entire Bitcoin network. 

“A miner of this size has only a 1 in ~100,000 chance of solving a block per day, or once every 300 years!,” pseudonymous CKPool developer Dr-ck posted on X. 

Bitcoin mining pits miners against each other in a race to solve cryptographic puzzles that secure the network as links or blocks of transactions get strung together. When a block is found, or the puzzle is solved, the successful miner is then provided a Bitcoin reward—currently 3.125 BTC, though that tally is cut in half every four years or so.

While blocks are typically found by powerful mining operations or pools, occasionally smaller solo miners will “hit the lottery,” earning massive rewards in the face of long odds. 

The latest solo victory comes just one week after another miner, also using CKPool’s service, found a Bitcoin block and earned around $210,000. 

That miner was using more than triple the computational power as Thursday’s block finder, still a small fraction of the overall network, which has seen its overall hash rate increase by nearly 15% in the last 24 hours, according to data from BitInfoCharts.

While the odds are stacked against smaller miners, the latest score was the 313th solo block found all-time by those utilizing CKPool’s service, which offers users the opportunity to mine Bitcoin without all the overhead required for running a full Bitcoin node on their own. In other words, users can make use of less mining hardware or less efficient miners, instead relying upon CKPool’s storage and bandwidth that allows them to keep participating. 

When a block is found using the service, miners pay a 2% fee to CKPool—but get to keep the rest of the sizable crypto reward.

Bitcoin is up 1.2% in the last 24 hours, recently changing hands at $72,094. The top crypto asset by market cap is now around 43% off its all-time high of $126,080, set last October.