On Thursday, an independent Bitcoin miner running about 230 terahash of computing power per second verified block 943,411, pocketing 3.139 BTC, worth about $210,000, despite controlling such a small share of the total network hashrate that it rounds to zero on most dashboards.
The miner connects to solo.ckpool.org, an anonymous solo mining pool launched in 2014 that allows operators to keep the entire block reward minus a 2% fee. CKpool developer Con Kolivas confirmed X’s victory, noting that the miner’s chance of finding a block on any given day was about 1 in 28,000.
As of early April, the winning device had a hash rate of 230 terahash, which is approximately 0.00002% of Bitcoin’s total estimated hash rate (approximately 1 zetahash per second). This output is consistent with a small bunch of home-scale ASICs running under a single roof, rather than a rented cloud burst or industrial operation.
For context, listed miner Riot Platforms alone has run over 30 exahashes, roughly 130,000 times the hashrate of Thursday’s winner.
The block was CKpool’s 312th solo win since its inception and the first since February 28, ending a 33-day drought. In the past 12 months, individual mining pools have discovered only 20 Bitcoin blocks, allocating a total of 62.96 Bitcoins. There is a separate block approximately every 18.7 days on average, with the longest interval being 58 days.
This win continues a pattern that has been repeated with surprising regularity this cycle.
In December, a roughly 270 TH/s miner was rewarded $284,633 at odds of 1 in 30,000 per day. In November, the output of a single old-generation ASIC running a miner running at just 6 TH/s (which you wouldn’t normally expect to find blocks over hundreds of years of continuous mining) fetched around $265,000 with a 1 in 180 million chance.
In late February, one miner converted approximately $75 in rented cloud computing power into a $200,000 reward by depositing 1 petahash into CKpool for a few hours.
