A lone Bitcoin miner that ran about 6 terahashes per second with hashpower — an amount so small it barely registers on the network — mined a full BTC block on Friday, earning 3,146 BTC plus fees worth nearly $265,000.
The feat was confirmed by Solo CK pool creator Con Kolivas, who noted that the miner had “only a one in 180 million chance” of solving a block on any given day.
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The winning miner controls only 0.0000007% of Bitcoin’s total network hashpower, which recently hit a record high of 855.7 exahashes per second. second.
The block is the 308th ever mined through CKpool since the software launched in 2014, and the first in approximately three months. CKpool allows miners to mine alone while using the pool’s infrastructure, meaning the winning address keeps the entire block reward minus a 2% fee.
Friday’s win is one of the luckiest solo-mined blocks in recent memory. In 2022, a solo miner with 126 TH/s beat odds of about 1 in 1.3 million to secure a block, but the scale of Friday’s gap between miner size and network hashrate makes this latest outcome far more unlikely.
The winning wallet had sent shares to the pool as usual, but at only 6 TH/s – the kind of hashrate produced by a single old-gen ASIC – the miner wouldn’t normally expect to find a block for hundreds of years of continuous mining.
Solo mining has become increasingly rare as Bitcoin’s hashrate increases, making the network more secure but reducing the likelihood that small miners can capture a block.
