A single Bitcoin miner has defied the odds by solving a Bitcoin block alone, netting them the full 3.125 Bitcoin (BTC) block reward.
On April 28, software engineer and administrator from the solo mining pool ckpool, Con Kolivas, posted to X that a miner had solved the 282nd solo block in Bitcoin’s history.
He added that the solo miner had a large hash rate of around 120 petahashes per second (PH/s) at the time, equal to around 0.12 exahashes per second (EH/s), with an average of around 12 PH/s over a week, which is roughly 0.02% of the total network hash rate.
The Bitcoin block reward was recently reduced from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC in the Bitcoin halving at block 840,000 on April 20, meaning block 841,286 was worth around $200,000 at the time.
Kolivas examined the block-solve summary, postulating that the miner recently switched from pooled mining after the halving “presumably for no longer recouping their electricity costs” for a chance at a solo block, or they have been “intermittently hashing/renting large amounts solo.”
The feat is remarkable because mining a valid block solo is an extremely rare event akin to winning the lottery. It is so rare that it has only occurred 282 times out of the 841,300 blocks produced since Bitcoin’s inception 14 years ago.
Mining BTC requires participants to input computational power to solve and add the next block to the network.
However, with the asset’s price increasing, mining has exploded in popularity, resulting in an increase in competitiveness (known as difficulty) and hash rate (network horsepower), meaning that it is almost impossible to solve a block alone.
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In March 2023, Cointelegraph reported that a solo miner netted the entire 6.25 BTC reward for solving a block. However, prices were much lower then, so the reward was around $150,000.
The most recent solo mined block was on April 5 — a couple of weeks before the halving — when a solo miner solved block 837,814 with 7 PH/s of hash rate, netting a reward of around $422,750 at the time.
The average network hash rate is currently 618 EH/s, having hit an all-time high of 728 EH/s on April 23, according to BitInfoCharts. It has increased by more than 90% over the past 12 months, making the latest solo mining achievement even more exceptional.
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