A lone Bitcoin miner operating at a modest rate of approximately 6 terahashes per second achieved a remarkable milestone on Friday by successfully mining a full Bitcoin block. This miner earned a total of 3.146 BTC, alongside transaction fees that amounted to nearly $265,000. The achievement was confirmed by Con Kolivas, the creator of the Solo CK pool, who highlighted the astronomically low odds of this miner solving a block—only one in 180 million on any given day.
This miner represents a mere 0.0000007% of Bitcoin’s overall network hashpower, which recently reached an all-time high of 855.7 exahashes per second. The block mined on Friday marks the 308th mined through CKpool since the service’s inception in 2014, and it is the first block mined in approximately three months. CKpool allows individual miners to engage in solo mining while leveraging the pool’s infrastructure, ensuring that the successful miner retains the entire block reward minus a 2% service fee.
Friday’s achievement is noted as one of the luckiest instances of solo mining in recent times. By comparison, in 2022, another solo miner with a hash rate of 126 TH/s secured a block despite odds calculated at roughly 1 in 1.3 million. However, the disparity between the miner’s low hash rate and the overall network’s power in this latest incident makes it significantly more unlikely.
The successful mining operation utilized shares submitted to the CKpool, but due to the miner’s humble hashpower of just 6 TH/s—typical of an older generation ASIC—this individual would not typically anticipate discovering a block in hundreds of years of continuous effort. The rising difficulty of solo mining has become apparent as Bitcoin’s hash rate continues to escalate, enhancing the network’s security but simultaneously diminishing the chances for smaller miners to claim block rewards.
