A small solo bitcoin miner walked away with the full subsidy and transaction fee reward for block 943,411 on Thursday, pocketing about $210,000 despite running a hashrate that would normally put such a win well out of reach.
The miner collected 3.139 BTC for the block, made up of a 3.125 BTC subsidy and 0.014 BTC ($937) in transaction fees, according to data from block explorer mempool.space. The setup was connected to solo.ckpool.org, the anonymous solo mining pool launched in 2014 that lets individual miners keep their full block rewards minus a 2% fee.
"Congratulations to miner bc1qtt7cr9cxykyp9g4hq47zf5lq9t97cxvq72lun3 with ~230TH for solving the 312th solo block at solo.ckpool.org!" CKpool developer Con Kolivas posted on X, adding that a miner of that size has roughly a 1-in-28,000 chance of finding a block on any given day.
At about 230 terahashes per second, the winning rig represents roughly 0.00002% of Bitcoin's total estimated hashrate of around 1 ZH/s as of April 2, per mempool.space's data. That output is consistent with a small stack of home-scale ASICs running under a single roof, rather than a rented cloud-hash burst.
Block 943,411 is the first solo win registered on CKpool since Feb. 28, ending a 33-day drought, according to the Bennet solo-miner tracker. Solo pools have found just 20 bitcoin blocks over the past 12 months, distributing a combined 62.96 BTC, or roughly one solo block every 18.7 days on average, with a longest gap of 58 days during the stretch.
Not the first long-shot win this cycle
Thursday's block fits a pattern The Block has tracked repeatedly since last year, with CKpool small-operator wins arriving every few months despite steadily rising network difficulty.
In December, a roughly 270 TH/s miner cleared 1-in-30,000 daily odds to claim a $284,633 reward for block 927,474, the 311th CKpool solo block. A month earlier, a miner running just 6 TH/s beat 1-in-180-million odds to land around $265,000 for block number 308. And in September, a 200 TH/s setup took home roughly $350,000 on block 913,593 at 1-in-36,000 daily odds.
Rented hashrate has also made a dent in the recent streak. In late February, a solo miner turned approximately $75 of on-demand cloud hashrate into a $200,000 reward by pointing just 1 PH/s at CKpool for block 938,092, CoinDesk reported at the time.
Mining's two-speed market
The win cuts against an increasingly bleak backdrop for industrial operators, whose Q1 balance-sheet moves sit at the opposite end of the risk spectrum from a lottery-ticket solo setup.
Riot Platforms sold 3,778 BTC during Q1 for $289.5 million in net proceeds, leaving its treasury at 15,680 BTC by quarter-end, according to its Thursday production update. Fellow Nasdaq-listed miner MARA Holdings offloaded roughly 15,133 BTC between March 4 and March 25 for about $1.1 billion, using the proceeds to buy back convertible notes. Nakamoto Inc. trimmed 284 BTC in March for around $20 million, and Genius Group liquidated its entire 84.15 BTC stack on April 1.
Bitcoin is trading for around $66,600 on Sunday afternoon, roughly flat over the past 24 hours, per The Block's Bitcoin Price page.
