A Bitcoin hobbyist has made a jaw-dropping win that most miners dream of as they draw together, rocking an entire block and bagging about $270,000 in the block subsidy as well as fees. With only about 6 terahashes per second (TH/s) of hashpower — the smallest speck on the global network — this solo success is an outlier in an industry where most have industrial-scale mining pools.
An Incredible Hit with Surprisingly Small Hashpower
At 6 TH/s, the miner’s share of Bitcoin network hashrate was approximately 0.0000007% at the time of reporting, as per CoinDesk data. At that scale, the time to find a block is expected to be centuries, which is why most small operators become part of pools so they can smooth payouts. This time, the unlikely happened: a miner was the first to find a valid block header, and this miner earned the entire reward.
The reward was approximately 3.146 BTC, including the 3.125 BTC block subsidy, considering additional fees based on transaction volume. Fees fluctuate with network congestion; on a busy day, they can add significant upside to a block, sometimes driving total rewards comfortably above the subsidy.
Why the Odds Are So Long for Solo Bitcoin Blocks
Mining is a probabilistic lottery. Each hash is a new ticket and your odds of winning depend on your share of all tickets purchased each second across the network. Con Kolivas, who maintains the Solo CK mining pool, said the chances were about one in 180 million. Variance goes both ways — long swaths of dry spells are probable, but so are occasional lightning strikes like this one.
Kolivas also points out the rarity of such an event: only 308 solo miners have discovered a complete block since CKPool launched in 2014. The CKPool is popular among tinkerers who like the idea of retaining full block rewards for finders, while handling backend connectivity — removing the need for a home operator to maintain their own full node infrastructure.
Why Pools Still Dominate the Overall Bitcoin Hashrate
Not that it was all warm and fuzzy; the larger mining map is still fairly concentrated. Recent network stats have had Antpool in control of some 21% of blocks, and F2Pool and ViaBTC each around 12%. Data aggregated by Blockchain.com indicates a substantial majority — 51%, or exactly half, of the total hashrate — is listed as unknown or undisclosed miners, demonstrating just how murky pool attribution can be.
This centralization is functional: payout volatility is mitigated by allowing participants to share equally in the rewards, proportional to the work they contributed. For most operators, dealing with tight power margins and hardware fluctuations, predictable cash flow is better than setting lottery odds, so when solo hobbyist-level finds happen they make headlines.
What It Means for Hobbyists and Decentralization
Solo success stories strike a chord, perhaps because they hearken back to Bitcoin’s founding ethos: anyone can participate under the same rules, even if everyone doesn’t start on an even economic footing. The protocol does not care if a block is found by a megawatt-scale farm or a basement rig, as long as the proof-of-work comes from valid hashes.
Still, it is crucial to separate the possible from the probable. At 6 TH/s — like an old-school ASIC or a bunch of USB miners — the odds are the same as solo-mining a block on a 286: that is, very slow, and about as likely to succeed as finding prime factors for Mersenne composites. For the majority of home miners, it is more likely a rational decision to pool mine. So far, solo mining has been more about luck and experimenting — not for producing real blocks or making a profit in any way.
Fees, Halvings, and the Evolving Block Reward Mix
The 3.146 BTC in bounty epitomizes how rewards are changing. As of the most recent halving, each block pays a 3.125 BTC subsidy and fees top up the amount collected. In periods of heavy on-chain activity — NFT-like engravings, exchange withdrawals and bolts of mempool congestion — fees can skyrocket up to a double-digit share of miner revenue. Analytics outfits including Glassnode and The Block have reported on a number of fee-driven bursts that temporarily buoyed miner revenue after the halving.
That fee component is what makes a solo win extra sweet during high-workload network windows — and why miners care about mempool conditions and transaction backlog dynamics, not just hashrate and electricity prices.
The Bottom Line on This Rare Solo Mining Win
A one-person miner claiming an entire block in Bitcoin is a statistical wonder, and it recalls that despite the industrial sheen of much of modern mining, the network still makes space for Cinderella stories. For nearly all miners, pools continue to be the convenient way forward. But, as the records of CKPool and Kolivas’s own tally show, unlikely doesn’t mean impossible — and every so often a hobbyist’s hash makes it pay dirt.
