Recent insights reveal that a solo miner successfully mined block 814,308 employing a mere 11 petahash per second (PH/s) of mining power. This feat was achieved through Solo Ckpool, a service for solo miners endowed with lower hashrates or older, less efficient hardware.
Solo Miner Finds Another Block in 2023; Unveils Unpredictable Vein of Bitcoin Mining
The realm of solo miners—entities mining bitcoin without the support of behemoth pools—has witnessed the discovery of several blocks this year. On October 28, 2023, Con Kolivas, a developer who manages Solo Ckpool announced that a lone bitcoin miner discovered block 814,308 wielding 11 PH/s of hashpower.
Unlike the colossal BTC mining pools that share the spoils of most of today’s block discovery, unique platforms like Ckpool are engineered to empower solo miners to carve their path independently. Although Ckpool boasts 3.1 exahash per second (EH/s) of hashpower, the scenario morphs when a solo miner strikes gold by mining a block.
Upon the successful mining of a block subsidy, the fortunate miner reaps 99% of the block reward, leaving other miners in the pool with empty hands. Just 72 days earlier, on the morning of August 18, 2023, Kolivas revealed that block height 803,821 had been mined by a solitary miner with only 1 PH/s of hashrate.
Kolivas further noted that a miner with 1 PH/s has a chance of success once every seven years to find a block, given the network’s difficulty. Despite the stroke of fortune, another miner found even greater luck in June, discovering block height 793,607 with only 17 terahash per second (TH/s) of mining power. At the time, Kolivas suggested the miner was likely using an old Bitmain S9 unit.
Besides small miners with low hashrates, solo entities with significantly more hashpower have been finding blocks without the assistance of large pools. In March 2023, a solo miner with 1 EH/s found block 782,845, and shortly thereafter, the same solo miner with 1 EH/s of hashpower located block 782,867. By employing techniques that enable solo miners to uncover lucrative block subsidies, these rare instances are occurring more sporadically.
The appeal of solo mining pools largely stems from the independence they afford to miners. The world of bitcoin mining is more random and unpredictable than commonly believed, with the discovery of a block not always correlating directly with a miner’s computational power. Often, it’s a game of chance, similar to a fortunate individual clinching victory with a single lottery ticket, compared to another who’s purchased multiple tickets to improve his odds.