A small bitcoin miner received a reward of 3,139 BTC by validating a block with a hashrate that was significantly lower than the total processing power of the network. The miner validated block 943,411 with a power of approximately 230 terahash/second and generated approximately $210 thousand in revenue from this transaction. This rate is considered negligible compared to the production capacity of the total bitcoin network, which approaches one zetahash per second.
Solo mining and the role of CKpool
The winning miner was affiliated with the solo.ckpool.org pool, which launched in 2014 and offers miners the opportunity to receive the full reward with just a 2 percent cut. Con Kolivas, the developer of CKpool, announced on social media that this block verification took place. Kolivas stated that the probability of the miner in question finding a block on any given day is approximately 1 in 28 thousand.
The power available to the miner remains within a range that can be achieved using several ASIC devices that can operate in a single home. So this gain is not the product of large-scale data centers or a cloud-based operation.
For comparison, it is known that the total processing power of Riot Platforms, one of the publicly traded mining companies, has exceeded 30 exahash. This amount is approximately 130 thousand times higher than the power of small miners validating blocks today.
Rare examples of solo achievements and block rewards
Today’s achievement marks the 312th solo block verification ever recorded on CKpool. Meanwhile, after the last solo success at the end of February, no new block was found in the pool for 33 days.
In the last 12 months, miners in solo pools confirmed only 20 bitcoin blocks in total, resulting in a reward of 62.96 BTC. On average, a solo block can be achieved in approximately 19 days. During this period, the longest period without a block was recorded as 58 days.
Such rare successes appear to have been repeated recently. It was reported that in December, a miner working at a speed of approximately 270 terahash won a reward of approximately 285 thousand dollars, despite the low probability of similar rates. In November, a miner working with a single, old-model ASIC device with a capacity of only 6 terahashes confirmed the block and received the reward with an extremely low chance of 1 in 180 million. That award was around 265 thousand dollars.
Again, in late February, a device directed to CKpool with 1 petahash processing power rented for just a few hours managed to win a block reward of 200 thousand dollars with an expenditure of approximately 75 dollars.
