- A solo Bitcoin miner with a relatively small setup beat steep odds to earn about $210,000 worth of BTC rewards last week.
- Despite having only a tiny fraction of the network’s total hashrate, the miner secured the reward, highlighting the rare but recurring phenomenon of solo miner wins.
Despite the highly competitive and commercialised nature of Bitcoin mining, little guys can still reap the rewards — as shown by the success of a tiny set-up that earned US$210,000 (AU$304k) worth of BTC for mining block 943,411 on April 3.
The windfall went to a solo miner using the CKPool service, which lets individuals mine Bitcoin without running a full node, for a 2% fee.
Data from block explorer mempool.space shows the miner earned a total subsidy of 3.19 Bitcoin, which included fees of 0.014 BTC (US$940/AU$1.3k).
CKPool developer Con Kolivas posted a congratulatory message to the miner on X and highlighted that a miner of this size has about a one-in-28,000 chance per day of solving a block.
Kolivas said it was the 312th solo block mined on CKPool.
The Bennet solo block tracker shows that 21 blocks have been solved by solo operators across various solo pools in the past 12 months, with solo miners collecting over US$4.5 million (AU$6.5m) in rewards.
Related: Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Slides as Storm Fallout and AI Shift Weigh on Network
Small Rigs Compete Against Mammoth Miners
What’s surprising about solo miners that beat the odds is the incredible difference between individual hashing power and what major miners are capable of.
The successful miner’s operation was running around 230 terahashes per second (TH/s) — where a terahash represents one trillion hashes/calculations per second. Bitcoin’s total hashrate was around 1 zetahash per second (one sextillion per second) at the time of writing — making the winning operation’s computational power around 0.00002%.
By comparison, data from BitcoinMiningStock shows that leading publicly-traded Bitcoin mining companies report hashrates that exceed 30 exahashes per second (EH/s). An exahash represents computing power equal to one quintillion computations per second.
Related: MARA Shares Jump 15% Despite $1.7B Loss as Bitcoin Miner Bets Big on AI Data Centers
Nasdaq-listed Bitdeer Technologies has an operating hashrate of 68 EH/s, while MARA Holdings has a hashrate of 61.70 EH/s.
This latest win by a solo miner isn’t the smallest hashpower to prevail — in late 2025, a CKPool miner running just 6 TH/s solved a block, giving the miner roughly one-in-180 million daily odds of success.
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