Solo Bitcoin Miner Hits the Jackpot, Winning $266K BTC Reward

A solo miner earned about 3.15 Bitcoin for mining the network’s 924,569th block on Friday, securing $266,000 worth of the asset, despite only having a sliver of a chance.

The individual, who onlookers believe was using a machine that’s designed for hobbyists, had a less than 1 in 100,000 chance per day of earning the reward, according to data from CKPool, a website that provides resources for people to mine Bitcoin on their own. The miner ultimately received 3.146 BTC, which includes the 3.125 BTC reward plus fees.

Some companies use massive amounts of computational resources to mine Bitcoin, but the individual that earned the payday on Friday was using a machine with a hash rate of around 1.2 terahash per second, or TH/s, resembling a Bitaxe Gamma—a compact, hobbyist machine that sells for about $100 or less.

In April, when a solo miner mined a block using a 1.2 TH/s machine, it was estimated that a machine like that would have a 0.00068390% chance per day of mining a block.

Unless a solo miner comes forward to identify themself, it’s ultimately impossible to know what machine they used, Bitcoin miner retailer Solo Satoshi noted on X in October.

Most entities mining Bitcoin use so-called pools, where their computational resources are combined with others, but solo miners take matters into their own hands.

“Another block for the plebs,” an account that goes by Bee Evolved said on X. “Stop telling yourself it can’t be yours, this is living proof that you can do it.”

This year, there’s been an uptick in the number of solo miners that have beaten the odds, but experts still compare the process of mining Bitcoin individually to playing the lottery.

Although CKPool (which isn’t actually a mining pool) has been responsible for a number of blocks mined by solo miners this year, a winner has been crowned only 13 times, meaning that the lucrative instances occur a little over once a month, according to Mempool Space.

Bitcoin miners compete using machines that constantly crunch complex calculations, in a race to find a “nonce,” also known as a “number used once.” As part of Bitcoin’s proof-of-work consensus mechanism, payouts come in the form of newly minted Bitcoin.

Some individuals are motivated by the prospect of a payday, but by contributing to the network’s security, Bitcoin’s backers say that solo miners also improve the network’s overall decentralization.