An entire Bitcoin block was apparently produced by a solo miner earlier this Monday.
The miner earned a reward of 3.125 BTC (roughly $303,500 at current prices).
Bob Burnett, founder, and CEO of Barefoot Mining, believes that the block was also possibly mined by a nation-state miner or a private
“It can be a huge thrill from winning a block but if you publish them all it can start to reveal too much information publicly… There is no upside to that information being known and plenty of downsides,” Burnett said.
Bitcoin blocks produced by solo miners are incredibly rare since one would have to beat unbelievable odds in order to achieve such a feat.
As reported by U.Today, a solo Bitcoin block was also mined last October. Notably, this was the first block found on a single device that was running a full note without the involvement of any third parties in more than a decade.
For instance, the chance of finding a block when solo mining with Antminer S21 XP Hydro, one of the most powerful ASIC miners currently available on the market, is just 1 in 1,648,330. It would take roughly 31 years to win a block.
During Bitcoin’s early days, it was possible to mine new coins by simply using one’s personal computer.
However, when the cryptocurrency started gaining some traction, mining difficulty started growing at a rapid pace, meaning that significantly more computational power was needed.
This led to the emergence of mining pools. Slush, the very first Bitcoin mining pool, was launched back in 2010.
Foundry US and AntPool are currently the two biggest mining pools in the world.
