How A Lone Bitcoin Miner Beat Overwhelming Odds And Banked $326,000

A solo miner just scooped up another huge Bitcoin reward by processing a block alone.

According to data from Bitcoin explorer mempool, the miner bagged a big reward of 3.151 BTC after solving block 899,826 with a solo-mining setup from CKpool. At today’s Bitcoin price of $103,694 per coin, that’s a more than $326,739 payday. But just how realistic is such a feat?

BTC Hash rate calculates the total computational power miners deploy on the Bitcoin network. The miner operated with a weekly hash rate of 6.11 PH/s, but boosted their compute power to as high as 261 PH/s to mine the BTC block. This, according to Con Kolivas, a software engineer and administrator of the Solo.ckpool, suggests that the solo miner likely rented additional hash rate — likely from a cloud or marketplace service — to better their odds of earning the block reward.

“This hashrate was almost certainly a rental based on there being only one worker, though the account has been mining for a while with a much lower hashrate,” Kolivas posited.

Bitcoin miners work to process blocks on the flagship crypto’s network. Blocks are full of transaction data and are part of the Bitcoin blockchain.

Since last year’s halving event, miners now receive a 3.125 BTC fixed reward, along with the transaction fees paid by those using the payment system during that specific block window.

As the network has evolved, mining operations have become harder and more energy-intensive, and therefore require more resources. Most blocks mined daily are done through massive industrial operations; warehouses full of machines operated by companies — the majority of which are publicly traded on U.S. stock exchanges.

Individual Mining Wins On The Rise?

Though this is the 300th block solved with CKpool and the standalone miner obviously rented extra hashpower, it’s no small accomplishment for a miner to solve a Bitcoin block alone. At Bitcoin’s total network hash rate of 796 EH/s as of June 5, the solo miner had a 0.03 % chance of success — or approximately 1 in 3,050.

While rare, it’s also not the first time a similar case has occurred, although it’s rare. On March 22, a solo Bitcoin miner earned 3.157 BTC (worth $266,000 at the time) for solving block 888,737. Likewise, in February, a single miner successfully mined block 883,181, earning a reward of 3.158 BTC (including fees), worth over $307,547 at the time.

With Bitcoin mining difficulty recently hitting a new all-time high, such solo wins could become even rarer.