Lucky solo bitcoin miner beats 1-in-28,000 daily odds to win $210,000 block reward

A small solo bitcoin miner walked away with the full subsidy and transaction fee reward for block 943,411 on Thursday, pocketing about $210,000 despite running a hashrate that would normally put such a win well out of reach.

The miner collected 3.139 BTC for the block, made up of a 3.125 BTC subsidy and 0.014 BTC ($937) in transaction fees, according to data from . The setup was connected to solo.ckpool.org, the anonymous solo mining pool launched in 2014 that lets individual miners keep their full block rewards minus a 2% fee.

"Congratulations to miner bc1qtt7cr9cxykyp9g4hq47zf5lq9t97cxvq72lun3 with ~230TH for solving the 312th solo block at solo.ckpool.org!" CKpool developer Con Kolivas , adding that a miner of that size has roughly a 1-in-28,000 chance of finding a block on any given day.

At about 230 terahashes per second, the winning rig represents roughly 0.00002% of Bitcoin's total estimated hashrate of around 1 ZH/s as of April 2, per mempool.space's data. That output is consistent with a small stack of home-scale ASICs running under a single roof, rather than a rented cloud-hash burst.

Block 943,411 is the first solo win registered on CKpool since Feb. 28, ending a 33-day drought, according to the . Solo pools have found just 20 bitcoin blocks over the past 12 months, distributing a combined 62.96 BTC, or roughly one solo block every 18.7 days on average, with a longest gap of 58 days during the stretch.

Not the first long-shot win this cycle

Thursday's block fits a pattern The Block has tracked repeatedly since last year, with CKpool small-operator wins arriving every few months despite steadily rising network difficulty.

In December, a roughly 270 TH/s miner cleared 1-in-30,000 daily odds to claim a $284,633 reward for block 927,474, the 311th CKpool solo block. A month earlier, a miner running just 6 TH/s beat 1-in-180-million odds to land around $265,000 for block number 308. And in September, a 200 TH/s setup took home roughly $350,000 on block 913,593 at 1-in-36,000 daily odds.

Rented hashrate has also made a dent in the recent streak. In late February, a solo miner turned approximately $75 of on-demand cloud hashrate into a $200,000 reward by pointing just 1 PH/s at CKpool for block 938,092, CoinDesk reported at the time.

Mining's two-speed market

The win cuts against an increasingly bleak backdrop for industrial operators, whose Q1 balance-sheet moves sit at the opposite end of the risk spectrum from a lottery-ticket solo setup.

Riot Platforms sold 3,778 BTC during Q1 for $289.5 million in net proceeds, leaving its treasury at 15,680 BTC by quarter-end, according to its Thursday production update. Fellow Nasdaq-listed miner MARA Holdings offloaded roughly 15,133 BTC between March 4 and March 25 for about $1.1 billion, using the proceeds to buy back convertible notes. Nakamoto Inc. trimmed 284 BTC in March for around $20 million, and Genius Group liquidated its entire 84.15 BTC stack on April 1.

Bitcoin is trading for around $66,600 on Sunday afternoon, roughly flat over the past 24 hours, per .