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A solo Bitcoin miner solved block 960,804 at 02:11 UTC on Monday, netting a reward worth about $200,000.
The block paid 3.15689830 BTC, made up of the 3.125 BTC subsidy and 0.032 BTC in fees from the 4,243 transactions it carried. It was the 317th solo block found through CKPool, the pseudonymous developer known as Dr -ck said, naming the winning address as bc1qdyqjq9qccp34pyv3kxmsrkn7p0amnsqqy8kdeq.
Bitcoin mining pits machines against each other to solve a cryptographic puzzle, with the winner taking the block reward—currently 3.125 BTC, a figure that halves roughly every four years.
This one was less of a lottery ticket than most. Dr -ck described the winner as running "a wildly variable - presumably rental - hashrate peaking at 100PH." Network hashrate stood at 924 exahashes per second, per mempool.space, so that peak amounted to roughly 0.011% of the network, or one block every 64 days or so. A hobbyist with a single 100 TH/s machine runs a thousandth of that, with odds nearer 1 in 62,750 on any given day—an average wait of 172 years.
Solo finds keep happening, though the term encompasses a broad church, from "hobby miners" using sub-$1,000 rigs like the Bitaxe and FutureBit Apollo, to services like Solo CKPool—which lets anonymous miners get started with a mining hook-up, without requiring them to run their own full Bitcoin node.
Solo Bitcoin Miners Are Winning More Blocks Lately—What Gives?
Solo blocks have come at a steady clip. A miner running 70 TH/s took $225,000 in April, a week after another scored $210,000. Earlier finds brought $266,000, $365,000 and $350,000. The varying dollar values track Bitcoin's price rather than any change in the odds. The reward itself is fixed at 3.125 BTC until the next halving at block 1,050,000, around 89,000 blocks away and expected in the spring of 2028, when it drops to 1.5625 BTC.
CKPool lets solo miners point hardware at its infrastructure without running a full node, taking a 2% cut of any block found. Dr -ck noted the block arrived "despite the chaos" from the recent exploit of the Coldcard hardware wallet, which has seen losses estimated at $114 million.
Bitcoin changed hands at around $63,700 Monday, up 1.1% on the day, per CoinGecko data. On prediction market Myriad, owned by Decrypt's parent company Dastan, users remain bearish on Bitcoin's outlook, placing a 68% chance on the cryptocurrency's next move taking it to $55,000.
