Ding ding ding—we have a winner!
A solo miner bagged a reward of 3.173 BTC ($349,028) by mining Bitcoin block number 903,883 late Thursday night. Winners like this don’t come around often; in fact, one expert says an underdog this small will only win every eight years on average.
Thursday night’s lucky winner was identified as using Solo CK, a non-profit service that enables Bitcoin miners to attempt to mine solo blocks. By using Solo CK, the miner paid a 2% fee but avoided the overhead required to run a high-end Bitcoin mining rig.
“Congratulations to miner bc1q~9sj3 with 2.3PH for solving block number 301,” the pseudonymous Dr. CK, software engineer and admin for Solo CK, wrote on X. “A miner of this size has about a 1 in 2,800 chance of solving a block every day, or once every 8 years on average.”
To put this into perspective, 2.3PH, short for petahashes, works out as a slither of Bitcoin’s total estimated hash rate of 881.11 EH/s, short for exahash. That’s just 0.00026% of the hash rate to be exact. When compared to Foundry USA’s hash rate, the mining pool that processed the block prior, the solo miner still pales in comparison with just 0.000847% of Foundry’s 271.7 EH/s hash rate.
Bitcoin miners spend computational power to solve complex mathematical equations to find what is called a “nonce,” which is short for “number used once.” That number makes the block meet Bitcoin’s difficulty requirement, which is constantly adjusting, and allows the block to be added to the blockchain.
The miner is then rewarded with newly minted Bitcoin and the transaction fees included in that block. Bitcoin mining is the underpinning of the proof-of-work consensus mechanism.
But it’s not like the old days—back when hobbyists could mine Bitcoin in their garages all the livelong day. Bitcoin mining is now industrialized and companies make use of warehouses full of ASIC machines to compete for mining rewards.
Mining solo and competing against massive companies for a block is pretty hard, and the odds of actually winning the reward are extremely low. Most solo miners who go this route join mining pools that combine participants’ power and split rewards among them. Scott Norris, CEO of independent Bitcoin miner Optiminer, told Decrypt that solo mining is “like playing the lottery,” despite some lucky winners.
For comparison, Foundry USA, an American-based mining pool, has been rewarded with 304,576 BTC ($32.8 billion) throughout its history. Since 2014, Solo CK users have mined 5,222 BTC, which is $594.9 million at today’s price—most of which were likely one-time winners, rather than the same solo miner winning multiple times.
The previous miner using Solo CK to successfully mine a block was four weeks ago, bagging a 3.15 BTC reward, or approximately $330,300. Before that, we’d have to go back three months for any Solo CK wins.
Solo mining is only set to get more difficult, as Bitcoin’s hash rate has been steadily increasing ever since it first launched. Over the past year, for example, the hash rate has increased 46% from 599.41 EH/s to 881 EH/s.
