A lone miner running roughly 230 terahashes per second (TH/s) beat long odds Thursday to validate Bitcoin block 943,411 and collect 3.139 BTC — about $210,000 at current prices. The win came through solo.ckpool.org, the anonymous solo-mining pool founded in 2014 that allows operators to keep full block rewards minus a 2% fee.
CKPool developer Con Kolivas confirmed the payout on X and noted the miner had roughly a 1-in-28,000 chance of finding a block on any given day. At ~230 TH/s, the rig represents only about 0.00002% of Bitcoin’s estimated network hashrate — around 1 zettahash per second (ZH/s) in early April — a footprint consistent with a small cluster of home ASICs rather than an industrial farm. By comparison, public miner Riot Platforms runs more than 30 exahashes (EH/s) — roughly 130,000 times the hashrate of this solo winner.
This is the 312th solo block recorded on CKPool and the first since Feb. 28, snapping a 33-day drought. Solo pools overall have found just 20 Bitcoin blocks in the past 12 months, distributing a combined 62.96 BTC — approximately one solo block every 18.7 days on average, with the longest gap in that period being 58 days.
The surprise paydays for tiny miners are part of a recurring pattern this cycle. In December, a ~270 TH/s miner beat roughly 1-in-30,000 daily odds to claim about $285,000. In November, an operator with just 6 TH/s — the output of a single older ASIC — defied roughly 1-in-180 million odds to secure nearly $265,000. And in late February, someone turned about $75 of rented cloud hashrate (pointing ~1 PH/s at CKPool for a few hours) into roughly $200,000.
These events underscore the role of randomness in Bitcoin mining: even very small miners can occasionally hit the jackpot, preserving a sliver of decentralization in a landscape otherwise dominated by massive, industrial-scale operations.
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