Much like hopeful lottery players who play despite knowing the odds are stacked firmly against them, there are still bitcoin miners who refuse to join a conventional mining pool.
Defiant, they choose to work alone — the solo miners of the Bitcoin network.
Solo mining is risky and mathematically irrational. Almost every miner joins large pools — usually set up to benefit Bitmain — for their predictable revenue. The chances of correctly solving Bitcoin’s mathematical puzzle working alone are nearly 0%.
Yet ‘near zero’ doesn’t equal zero. Protos has put together a chart detailing when in the past 10 years, solo bitcoin miners have struck it lucky — click here to view.
Depending on the definition of a ‘solo-mined’ block, there might be fewer than 300 such blocks produced in the last decade of Bitcoin’s existence. According to a March 10, 2023 estimate, solo miners’ luck had dwindled to one block every 10 months on average.
To put that single block into context, conventional pools usually mine 43,200 blocks every 10 months.
Others estimate the odds at even worse than that one in 43,200. Hass McCook of the Bitcoin Mining Council claimed the odds were “one in 1,400,000.”
However, neither of those estimates has predicted the 11 solo-mined blocks found within the past six months. Over the past few months at least, solo miners have been enjoying a hot streak of luck.
Read more: First bitcoin mining pool adds Stratum V2 feature to circumvent Bitmain
So, how many total blocks have solo miners mined since Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared in 2011? Cointelegraph estimated the number of solo mined blocks at just 270 as of March 2023.
However, it’s impossible to know the exact number. First of all, miners don’t have to disclose their membership in any pool. Although solo blocks are usually obvious by their irregular data, sophisticated solo miners could attempt to disguise their rogue block by using lookalike templates and headers.
The very non-pool-like ‘pool’ for solo miners
The vast majority of blocks discovered by solo miners in the past decade have come from the Solo CK Pool.
A mining ‘pool’ only by the strictest of definitions, Solo CK is, in effect, a non-pool service for solo miners who aren’t hyper-privacy conscious. Unlike a pool, miners who point hash rate to the service pay for 100% of their own mining costs, receive $0 compensation for working without mining a block, and receive 98% (less a 2% convenience fee) of their coinbase reward when they mine a block.
Retrieving all blocks tagged ‘Solo CK Pool’ reveals 275 solo-mined blocks — possibly the majority of what is likely a maximum of a few hundred solo-mined blocks since 2011.
