Solo miner wins $200K Bitcoin lottery with just 0.012% of hashrate

Another solo Bitcoin miner has just hit the Bitcoin mining jackpot, successfully processing a Bitcoin block against all odds and netting themselves a payday of just under $200,000. The miner processed block number 858,978 at 4:21 pm UTC, according to data from the Bitcoin block explorer Mempool.space. The block contained 2,391 transactions, and the miner received 3.27 Bitcoin  for their efforts, worth $199,094 at current prices.

Notably, the miner responsible for processing the block was the Solo CK Pool, a solo mining pool that doesn’t act like a typical one. According to Mempool.space data, the Solo CK miner utilized 456 petahashes worth of hashrate when the block was solved. The average network hashrate is currently 665 exahashes per second (EH/s), meaning the miner that processed the transaction was running at around 0.012% of the average hashrate. Bitcoin’s hashrate hit an all-time high of 754 EH/s on July 23, according to BitInfoCharts.

Despite its name, the SoloCK “pool” combines the hashrate of small miners but only distributes the reward to the miner responsible for solving the block. The miner solved 14 Bitcoin blocks in the last year, receiving 59.3 Bitcoin, which is worth $3.5 million at current prices.

Due to the prominence of large mining firms such as Riot Blockchain and Marathon Digital, which command massive amounts of hash power, it’s rare for solo miners to successfully validate a block. A solo miner successfully processing a block is so rare that it has only occurred roughly 290 times out of the 859,000 blocks produced since Bitcoin’s inception 14 years ago. In March 2023, Cointelegraph reported that a solo miner netted the entire 6.25 BTC reward for solving a block. However, the price of Bitcoin was much lower, and the reward was worth around $150,000 at the time. The most recent solo-mined block was on July 25, when a solo miner solved block 853,742, netting a reward of around $210,000.