Solo Bitcoin Miner Hits Jackpot, Earns $360,000 After Beating Heavy Odds

A solo Bitcoin BTC/USD miner solved an entire block on Sunday, earning a total reward of more than $360,000.

Solo Miner Gets Lucky

The block 910440, which contained 4.193 transactions, was mined early morning hours through an individual mining pool operated by the Solo CK pool, according to data from Mempool.

The miner netted a transaction fee of 0.012 BTC and coupled with the fixed block reward of 3.125 BTC, they earned a total of 3.137 BTC, worth $362,376, as of this writing.

Odds Stacked Against Solo Miners

According to Con Kolivas, the admin of the CK solo mining pool, the miner invested a computing power of 9 PetaHashes per second to solve the block.

"A miner of this size has about a 1 in 800 chance of solving a block per day," Kolivas said.

Solo Vs Pool Mining

Solo mining is different from pool mining, where participants combine their computing power to increase the likelihood of mining a block. However, participants need to pay fees to use the pool, which ends up eating into their overall earnings.

Solo mining, on the other hand, doesn’t require paying fees to the pool operator, but it demands large investments, and the likelihood of finding a block reduces due to lower hash power.

Bitcoin’s mining difficulty, a measure of how hard it is to find a valid block on the network, has steadily risen over the years, leading to growing demand for hash power and investments in expensive mining equipment.