Solo Bitcoin Miner Hits the Jackpot with $218,000 Block Reward

A solo Bitcoin miner beat the odds on Monday, solving a block and taking home a whopping $218,544 reward. The miner of block 841286 became the 282nd solo miner in Bitcoin history across more than 841,000 blocks to achieve this feat.

According to Con Kolivas, lead developer of mining software provider CKpool, the miner contributed an average of 12 petahashes—1,000,000,000,000,000 (one quadrillion) hashes per second, or about 0.02% of the network’s total hash rate. In other words, his odds of beating all the Bitcoin mining pools and every single Bitcoin miner to mine a Bitcoin block were just 0.02% or around 1 in 5,000.

Kolivas offered some insight into the miner's potential strategy.

"From the block solve summary, one can postulate that this large miner either recently switched from pooled mining post-halving (presumably for no longer recouping their elec. costs) for a chance at a solo block, or has been intermittently hashing/renting large amounts solo.," he said in a response to his tweet.

This is the first block mined by a solo miner since the last Bitcoin halving. Solo mining is extremely challenging due to several key factors. Firstly, mining involves competing against the entire network's hash rate and difficulty level. As more miners join the network, the overall difficulty increases, making it harder for solo miners to find blocks.

The usual way to mine Bitcoin today is by joining forces with other miners and then splitting the earnings. This modern version of a guild is known in the crypto space as a mining pool. Right now, the Chinese pool Antpool and the American pool Foundry USA control 49% of the total hashrate of the Bitcoin network.

Additionally, solo mining relies heavily on luck, as rewards are directly tied to the miner's ability to solve complex cryptographic puzzles within the network. This unpredictability contrasts with the more stable and consistent rewards seen in pool mining.

Before this, on August 18, 2023, a solo miner with a mere 1 PH/s in hash power solved block 803,821 netting a reward of 6.25 Bitcoin—worth around $160,000 at the time.

Edited by Stacy Elliott.