A solo Bitcoin miner struck gold on April 28th –– successfully validated block number 841,286, earning the full block reward of 3.125 Bitcoin, worth approximately $200,000 at that time.
This marks the 282nd solo-mined block in Bitcoin’s history, as reported by Con Kolivas, a software engineer and administrator behind ckpool, a popular solo mining pool.
He pointed out that the solo miner’s hash rate reached around 120 petahashes per second (PH/s), which is approximately 0.12 exahashes per second (EH/s). Over a week, the miner’s average hash rate was about 12 PH/s, accounting for about 0.02% of the entire network’s hash rate.
The Bitcoin block reward decreased from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC due to the Bitcoin halving that occurred at block 840,000 on April 20. Consequently, block 841,286 was worth approximately $200,000 at that time.
After examining the block-solve summary, Kolivas theorized that the miner might have shifted to solo mining from pooled mining following the halving. This change could have happened because the miner was no longer able to cover their electricity costs through pooled mining, prompting them to try solo mining. Alternatively, the miner might have been “intermittently hashing/renting large amounts solo.”
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This achievement is extraordinary because successfully mining a valid block solo is like hitting the lottery.
It’s incredibly rare; miners have only solved 282 solo blocks out of the 841,300 blocks mined since Bitcoin began 14 years ago.
To mine BTC, participants need computational power to solve complex problems and add the next block to the Bitcoin network.
With the rise in Bitcoin’s value, mining gained immense popularity, causing a spike in competition (also called difficulty) and an increase in hash rate (the computational power of the network). This makes solving a block solo nearly impossible.
In March 2023, a solo miner earned the full 6.25 BTC reward for solving a block. However, because prices were lower at that time, the reward was approximately $150,000.
On April 5, just a couple of weeks before the halving, a solo miner solved block 837,814 with a hash rate of 7 PH/s, earning a reward of about $422,750 at that time.
BitInfoCharts reported that the average network hash rate is currently 618 EH/s, after reaching an all-time high of 728 EH/s on April 23. This represents an increase of more than 90% over the past year, which makes the recent solo mining success even more remarkable.
