Lucky solo bitcoin miner beats roughly one-in-300-year odds to win $222,000 block reward

A solo bitcoin miner beat monumental odds to solve a block and take home the full subsidy and transaction fee reward early Thursday.

The miner collected a total of 3.128 BTC ($222,012) for mining block 944,306, using solo bitcoin-mining software from CKpool, according to the Bitcoin explorer Mempool. This comprised 3.125 BTC in block subsidy rewards ($221,800) and 0.003 BTC ($212) in transaction fees.

"Congratulations to miner bc1q~edvj with only 70TH for solving the 313th solo block at eusolo.ckpool.org!" CKpool developer Con Kolivas posted on X, "A miner of this size has only a 1 in ~100,000 chance of solving a block per day, or once every 300 years!" 

That hashrate is equivalent to just one 2019-era Bitmain Antminer S17+ mining machine, for example.

The solo miner's hashpower is equivalent to about 0.0000069% of the Bitcoin network's total estimated hashrate of 1.02 ZH/s on April 9, per Mempool's data, which measures the total computational power dedicated to the network. For comparison, leading public bitcoin miners Bitdeer Bitdeer Technologies Group (BTDR) and MARA Holdings MARA Holdings, Inc. (MARA) manage a hashrate of approximately 71 EH/s and 61.7 EH/s, respectively, according to recent disclosures.

Why solo miners try their luck

While CKpool is technically a mining pool, it is not used in the conventional sense where miners combine their hashrate for a better chance at block discovery by collaborating and sharing the rewards. Instead, the vast majority of users use CKpool for solo mining, accepting a much lower probability of finding a block on their own, but keeping the entire reward for themselves if they do, minus a small fee. It avoids the need to run their own infrastructure, making it a simple setup compared to true solo mining.

However, it's not the first time a solo miner has picked up the entirety of the block rewards. 

Just last week, another miner using CKpool in a solo mining configuration collected roughly $210,000 for mining block 943,411, ending a 33-day CKpool drought. A miner of that size has roughly a 1-in-28,000 chance of finding a block on any given day, Kolivas said at the time.

A miner beat one-in-100-year odds to win a $350,000 block reward in September, and another beat 1-in-82-year odds in December to win a $285,000 block reward.

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