In short
- A solo Bitcoin miner earned a Bitcoin block reward of 3.13 BTC on Thursday, worth about $282,000.
- The miner used Solo CKPool, a service designed to help solo miners mine Bitcoin blocks.
- Solo mining is becoming increasingly difficult as the hash rate or computing power of the network increases year by year.
A solo Bitcoin miner earned a reward of 3.13 BTC on Thursday, worth about $282,000.
According to the administrator of CK Pool, the service used by the miner and designed to help solo miners win blocks, this achievement had a probability of about 1 in 30,000.
“Congratulations to miner 1Ng9~VoQz with 270TH for solving the 311th solo block on solo.ckpool.org,” the pseudonymous developer and pool operator wrote on X.
To use the pool, miners pay a 2% fee – in this case about 0.062 BTC (about $5,734) – to the service when they mine blocks, but they don’t have to bear the overhead of running a full, expensive Bitcoin mining rig.
The latest block victory was the fourth in the past three weeks for Solo CK Pool-powered miners. For that, you’d have to go back to find the latest Solo CK block reward, according to data from September mempool.space.
Solo CK Pool miners have now earned a total of 5,553 BTC for their mining efforts, a total of approximately $511 million at current prices.
Although solo miners can sometimes strike gold and earn their own block, experts told us Declutter earlier this year that mining without the support of a large pool “is like playing the lottery.”
This statement is especially true as Bitcoin’s hashrate, or the total computing power of the network, continues to increase – now averaging more than 1 ZH/S over the past 24 hours, up from last year about 736 EH/S on this day.
Mining Bitcoin, or other proof-of-work cryptocurrencies, requires miners to spend exorbitant computing power solving complex mathematical equations. Solving these equations requires a lot of power and energy, and special hardware that can be expensive.
As a reward, miners receive freshly minted Bitcoin – currently 3,125 BTC, along with user fees from the mined block.
As the economics of Bitcoin mining change, some publicly traded mining companies are shifting their priorities to fueling the AI boom – or getting out of the Bitcoin business altogether. In November, publicly traded company Bitfarms announced it would shut down its Bitcoin mining operations after incurring a $46 million loss. focus on providing computing power for the fast-growing AI industry.
Bitcoin has been flat over the past 24 hours and recently changed hands at $90,062.
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