Talk about winning the lottery. One solo miner walked away with over $200,000 in bitcoin while renting only $75 of hash power.
A solo miner validated block 938,092 around 8:04 UTC Tuesday and earned the full 3,125 BTC block reward by using hashrate rented through on-demand cloud services, according to blockchain data from Mempool.space.
The miner spent about 119,000 satoshis, about $75, to rent 1 petahash per second of computing power and used CKPool, a service that lets individual miners work independently while relying on a pool server to issue and submit solutions.
The math on that return is absurd. That’s a 2,600x payout on what’s equivalent to a lottery ticket with better odds than most actual lotteries.
Bitcoin’s network processes transactions by aggregating them into blocks, which are added to the blockchain approximately every 10 minutes. Miners compete to solve a cryptographic puzzle for the right to add each block, and the winner collects the reward.
The competition is measured in hash rate, the amount of computing power a miner throws at the puzzle. More hashrate means more guesses per second and better odds.
Statistically rare
A solo miner renting 1 petahash is like bringing a slingshot to a gunfight. The chances of the individual petahash solving a block before the industrial operations do are vanishingly small, about the same as finding a particular grain of sand on a beach.
But someone has to win every block, and probability doesn’t care about scale. As such, while solo-mined blocks remain statistically rare, they are not as rare as they used to be.
Data from solo mining aggregator Bennet shows that 21 individual miners have successfully validated blocks over the past year, earning a combined 66 BTC worth $4.1 million at current prices. That’s a 17% increase in solo blocks found year-over-year, with one landing on average every 17 days.
The increase in on-demand hashrate rentals has lowered the barrier to entry.
Miners no longer need to own physical hardware to take a shot. Cloud-based services let anyone rent computing power for as little as a few dollars, turning solo mining from an infrastructure-heavy operation to something closer to a scratch card with transparent odds.
Meanwhile, the lucky block landed at an interesting moment for bitcoin mining economics.
Network problems just rose to 144.4 trillion after the latest adjustment, a 15% increase that reversed an 11% drop caused by severe US winter storms earlier this month. The increase means miners now need an average of 144.4 trillion hash attempts to find a valid block compared to the very first blocks in 2009.
The storm-driven drop was the sharpest hashrate drop since China’s mining ban in 2021, temporarily making blocks easier to find before the network recalibrated.
And for a miner with $75 and good timing, the window was enough.
