Solo Bitcoin Miner Strikes Gold with $200,000 Block Reward

A solo Bitcoin miner has hit the jackpot​, mining a Bitcoin block and earning an impressive reward of close to $200,000​. This feat​, which is uncommon in cryptocurrency mining,​ highlights the enduring appeal of Bitcoin mining despite the dominance of mining operations in the industry.

Against the Odds: A Solo Miner’s Triumph

According to data from the Bitcoin block explorer Mempool, a solo miner in the Solo CK Pool successfully confirmed block number 858,978 at 4:21 PM UTC. This block contained 2,391 transactions. The miner received 3.27 BTC for their work, equivalent to $199,094 at current market rates.

The Solo CK Pool stands out from mining pools because it doesn’t follow the traditional approach of distributing the full block reward among all participating miners based on their hash rate contributions. Instead, it concentrates the block reward solely on the miner who successfully solves it. This unique setup offers miners a chance to earn substantial rewards even though their chances of success are quite low.

During the block validation process, the Solo CK miner had a hash rate of 456 PH/s, which was much lower than the average network hash rate of 665 EH/s. To give you an idea of the scale here, the miner was only operating at around 0 012 % of the average network hash rate, which shows just how unlikely their success truly was.

Bitcoin’s Network Hashrate Hits New Heights

Bitcoin’s hash rate hit an all-time high of 754 EH/s on July 23, according to BitInfoCharts. Despite its name, the SoloCK “pool” combines the hash rate of small miners but only distributes the reward to the miner responsible for solving the block. 

The SoloCK miner solved 14 Bitcoin blocks last year, receiving 59.3 Bitcoin worth $3.5 million at current prices. Due to the prominence of large mining firms such as Riot Blockchain and Marathon Digital, which command massive amounts of hash rate power, it’s a rare occurrence for solo miners to validate a block successfully. 

A solo miner successfully processing a block is so rare that it has only occurred roughly 290 times out of the 859,000 blocks produced since Bitcoin’s inception 14 years ago.