“Very Lucky” Solo Miner Solves Bitcoin Block for $148K Reward
by James · March 12, 2023
A solo Bitcoin miner was rewarded for adding block 780,112 to Bitcoin’s blockchain, beating the odds as countless others raced toward the same goal.
The miner used the Solo CK Pool mining service to establish a solo mining pool, where they produced a valid hash for the block and received a reward of 6.25 BTC and a fee reward of around 0.63 BTC – worth around $148,000 – according to BTC.comits Bitcoin explorer.
One Twitter user pointed out how lucky the solo miner was to produce the valid hash, saying that it would usually take a miner much longer to create a valid transaction given the limited computing power they used.
“A miner of this size will solve a block on average about once every 10 months,” stated Twitter user @ckpooldev. “They’ve only been soloing for the last 2 days so they’ve been very lucky.”
The miner worked at an average hash power of 6.7 PH/s (petahashes per second), according to @ckpooldev. Around the time the block was added, Bitcoin’s total hash rate was around 308,262 PH/s, meaning that the solo miner’s hash rate of 6.7 PH/s represented about 0.002% of the blockchain’s entire computational power.
An account on the Bitcoin forum bitcointalk.org stepped forward to claim responsibility for producing the valid hash, saying he rented extra power for less than a day using a service called nicehash.
“It’s actually a great luck to catch a block with such a hashrate,” said the user Pineconeeee stated on the forum. “In less than a day, fortune smiled on me.”
The solo miner, who said they are from Russia, explained that they usually use a computing power of around 270 TH/s (terahashes per second), but rented 5 PH/s (petahashes per second) of power last Thursday, according to his mail.
The block mined by the solo miner contained 3,220 transactions that comprised a Bitcoin volume of around 16,940.
To add a block to a proof-of-work network like Bitcoin, miners continuously run calculations to find a valid hash for the block, using a process similar to computational brute force.
These days, a majority of new blocks added to Bitcoin’s blockchain are mined via mining pools, where miners pool their computing power to increase their chances of creating a valid hash.
Technically, it is possible for a Bitcoin miner to get lucky every now and then and produce a valid hash on their own, despite the competition from other computers trying to calculate a valid hash for the next block on Bitcoin’s network.
In accordance BTC.com, the largest mining pool in the world is currently Foundry USA, a mining pool that accounts for around 34% of the total hash rate on Bitcoin’s network in the last 24 hours. The mining pool’s hash rate is around 107 EH/s (exahashes per second) – around 15,970 times more powerful than the solo miner.
