Lucky solo bitcoin miner beats one-in-100-year odds to win $350,000 block reward

A solo bitcoin miner beat monumental odds to solve a block and take home the full subsidy and transaction fee reward on Sunday.

The miner collected a total of 3.129 BTC ($347,980) for mining block 913,593, using solo bitcoin-mining software from CKpool, according to the Bitcoin explorer Mempool. This comprised 3.125 BTC in block subsidy rewards ($347,509) and 0.004 BTC ($471) in transaction fees.

"Congratulations to miner bc1q~jr38 for solving the 307th solo block at solo.ckpool.org, with only 200TH!" CKpool developer Con Kolivas posted on X. "A miner of this size only has a 1 in ~36,000 chance of solving a block each day, or once every ~100 years!" 

That hashrate is equivalent to just one 2024 Bitmain Antminer S21 air-cooled mining machine, for example.

The solo miner's hashpower represents about 0.00002% of the Bitcoin network's total estimated hashrate of 1.04 ZH/s on Sept. 8, per Mempool's data. For comparison, leading public bitcoin miners MARA and IREN manage a hashrate of approximately 59.4 EH/s and 50 EH/s, respectively, according to their latest disclosures.

Bitcoin's hashrate measures the total computational power dedicated to the network by miners, recently breaking the one zetahash per second milestone — a trillion trillion hashes — even as miners face slumping fees, rising difficulty, and shrinking revenues.

Why solo miners try their luck

Smaller bitcoin miners typically join shared pools to earn steady, proportional rewards, as solo mining has an extremely low chance of winning a block. Nevertheless, some try solo pools for a shot at the full block reward, avoiding fees and hoping for a big, lottery-esque win despite the odds.

However, it's not the first time a small solo miner has picked up the entirety of the block rewards. For example, a solo bitcoin miner with a hashrate of just 126 TH/s also beat the odds to mine a block in 2022 — picking up around $260,000 in rewards at the time. Solo miners with more substantial managed or rented hashrates have also found several bitcoin blocks in recent months.