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A single Bitcoin miner defied the odds by solving a block on their own, securing the entire 3.125 Bitcoin (BTC) reward worth approximately $200,000.
On April 28, Con Kolivas, a software engineer and administrator for the solo mining pool ckpool, announced on X that a solo miner successfully solved the 282nd solo block in Bitcoin’s history.
The miner had a substantial hash rate of approximately 120 petahashes per second (PH/s), equivalent to 0.12 exahashes per second (EH/s). Over the course of a week, the miner averaged around 12 PH/s, representing roughly 0.02% of the total network hash rate.
The block reward recently decreased from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC due to the Bitcoin halving event at block 840,000 on April 20. As a result, block 841,286 was valued at around $200,000.
Kolivas speculated that the miner may have switched from pooled mining after the halving, possibly due to concerns about covering electricity costs, or they may have been intermittently hashing or renting large amounts of solo mining power.
Mining a valid block solo is an exceptionally rare event, similar to winning the lottery. Since Bitcoin’s inception 14 years ago, it has only occurred 282 times out of the 841,300 blocks produced.
Bitcoin mining involves participants using computational power to solve and add the next block to the network. However, the rising popularity of mining, spurred by the increasing value of the asset, has led to greater competitiveness and hash rate, making solo block solving increasingly difficult.
In March 2023, Cointelegraph reported a solo miner who secured the full 6.25 BTC reward for solving a block, valued at around $150,000 at the time.
The most recent solo mined block occurred on April 5, just weeks before the halving, when a solo miner solved block 837,814 with a hash rate of 7 PH/s, earning a reward of approximately $422,750 at that time.
Currently, the average network hash rate stands at 618 EH/s, reaching an all-time high of 728 EH/s on April 23, according to BitInfoCharts. The 90% increase in hash rate over the past 12 months highlights the extraordinary nature of the latest solo mining achievement.