Solo miner bags entire block reward with just 1PH of power
In an era when bitcoin mining giants are amassing warehouses full of specialized mining rigs, solo miners have fewer and fewer wins
mimagephotography/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks
An astoundingly lucky solo miner solved block number 803,821 late Friday night and won the entire 6.25 bitcoin block reward, worth approximately $162,000.
Con Kolivas, the admin of Solo CKPool, announced the unlikely news on X, formerly Twitter, saying that this particular miner had only 1 petahash of computing power, yet still came out on top.
“A miner of this size would only solve a block solo on average once every 7 years at current [difficulty],” Kolivas wrote.
The miner kept nearly all the bitcoin (BTC) he won, aside from a 2% fee that went to Solo CKPool for its upkeep.
As Kolivas alluded to in his post, bitcoin difficulty — which indicates how challenging it is to find a valid hash that’s below the target — has skyrocketed from January 2023. Now, it’s at an all-time high of 52.39 trillion. This means that the target hash value a miner must produce is exceedingly low, and given the immense difficulty, a miner might have to compute an incredibly large number of hashes before producing one that’s valid for a block.
Having more mining machines and powerful hardware makes the odds of solving a block that much easier, which makes what this solo miner did even more notable.
Bitcoin difficulty is also adjusted roughly every two weeks or every 2,016 blocks, and the difficulty is projected to increase on Tuesday by nearly 7% to 56.03 trillion.
Blockworks previously reported on an even more improbable solo bitcoin miner win in June. That person solved block 793,607 with what was likely a single Antminer S9 rig.
Solo CKPool said at the time that a miner of that size would only solve a block “once every 450 years on average.”
Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter.
Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the On the Margin newsletter.
The Lightspeed newsletter is all things Solana, in your inbox, every day. Subscribe to daily Solana news from Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.
