Lucky solo bitcoin miner beats 1-in-82-year odds to win $285,000 block reward

A solo bitcoin miner beat staggering odds to solve a block and take home the full subsidy and transaction fee rewards late Thursday.

The miner collected a total of 3.133 BTC ($284,633) for mining block 927,474, using solo bitcoin-mining software from CKpool, according to the Bitcoin explorer Mempool. This comprised 3.125 BTC in block subsidy rewards ($283,944) and 0.008 BTC ($689) in transaction fees.

"Congratulations to miner 1Ng9~VoQz with 270TH for solving the 311th solo block at solo.ckpool.org!" CKpool developer Con Kolivas posted on X. "A miner of this size has a 1 in 30,000 chance of solving a block per day." This equates to roughly once every 82 years.

The hashrate was split over three bitcoin mining machines with around 90 TH/s each, Kolivas added — roughly consistent with the output of common Bitmain Antminer S19 air-cooled ASICs, for example.

The solo miner's hashpower is the equivalent of about 0.00002% of Bitcoin's total estimated hashrate of 1.15 ZH/s on Dec. 11, per Mempool's data, which measures the total computational power dedicated to the network. Leading public bitcoin miners MARA and IREN manage a hashrate of approximately 59.4 EH/s and 50 EH/s, respectively, according to recent disclosures.

Why solo miners try their luck

Smaller bitcoin miners usually join shared pools to earn steady, proportional rewards since solo mining has an extremely low chance of winning a block. Nevertheless, some try solo pools for a shot at the full block reward, hoping for a big, lottery-esque win despite the odds.

However, it's not the first time a solo miner has picked up the entirety of the block rewards, nor one of the luckiest. For example, last month, a solo bitcoin miner with a tiny hash rate of just 6 TH/s beat odds of 1-in-180 million to mine a block — picking up around $265,000 in rewards at the time.

Solo miners with more substantial managed or rented hashrates have also found several bitcoin blocks in recent months.

Bitcoin is currently trading for around $92,264 on Friday, up 2.2% over the past 24 hours, per The Block's BTC price page.