Bitcoin solo miner hits a prize of $285,000, a once-in-82-years event

A solo Bitcoin miner has surpassed the extremely low probability of solving a block and received the full block reward plus transaction fees by the end of Thursday.

According to data from the blockchain explorer Mempool, this miner earned a total of 3,133 BTC ( approximately $284,633 USD ) upon successfully mining block number 927,474 using CKpool’s solo mining software. Of this, 3,125 BTC ( $283,944 USD ) came from the block reward and 0.008 BTC ( $689 USD ) from transaction fees.

“Congratulations to Miner 1Ng9~VoQz with a hash rate of 270 TH, for solving the 311th solo block at solo.ckpool.org!” wrote CKpool developer Con Kolivas on X. “A miner of this scale has only a 1 in 30,000 chance of solving a block each day,” equivalent to roughly once every 82 years.

Kolivas stated that this total hash rate is distributed across three Bitcoin mining rigs, each about 90 TH/s — comparable to popular ASICs like the air-cooled Bitmain Antminer S19.

In terms of scale, the computational power of this solo miner is only about 0.00002% of the estimated total hash rate of the Bitcoin network, which reached approximately 1.15 ZH/s on December 11 according to Mempool. Meanwhile, large publicly traded Bitcoin mining companies like MARA and IREN currently manage hash rates of approximately 59.4 EH/s and 50 EH/s, respectively, per recent disclosures.

Bitcoin network hash rate | Image: Mempool.## Why solo miners still try their luck

Typically, small miners join pools to receive regular rewards proportional to their contribution, because solo mining has an extremely low probability of finding a block. Nonetheless, some still choose to participate in solo pools in hopes of “hitting the jackpot,” gaining the chance to receive the entire block reward if lucky.

This is not the first time a solo miner has claimed the entire block reward, nor the luckiest case. Last month, a solo miner with just 6 TH/s of hash rate beat the odds of 1 in 180 million to successfully mine a block, earning about $265,000 USD at that time.

In recent months, solo miners with larger or rented hash rates have also found several Bitcoin blocks.

Thach Sanh