Small Solo Miner Beats 1-in-100,000 Odds for $222K

A lone Bitcoin miner working with very modest hardware defied long odds early Thursday by solving a block and collecting the full block reward plus fees.

The miner found block 944,306 using solo.ckpool.org, an anonymous solo-mining pool that has operated since 2014 and returns the entire block reward minus a 2% fee. Blockchain explorer records show the payout comprised a 3.125 BTC block subsidy (about $222,012) plus roughly 0.003 BTC in transaction fees (around $212).

CKpool developer Con Kolivas confirmed the result on X, saying the miner faced roughly a 1-in-100,000 chance of finding a block on any given day.

The winner’s share of network hashpower was tiny — about 0.0000069% of Bitcoin’s estimated total hashrate of roughly 1.02 ZH/s as of April 9. That vanishingly small fraction suggests the setup was likely a small cluster of home-based ASICs rather than a large industrial operation or rented cloud rigs.

For scale, publicly listed mining firms report vastly larger capacities: recent filings show Bitdeer Technologies Group at about 71 EH/s and MARA Holdings at about 61.7 EH/s.

Solo wins on CKpool are uncommon but not unprecedented. This was the 313th solo win recorded on CKpool since 2014. Recent examples include a November win by a miner running roughly 6 TH/s (about a single older ASIC) that overcame estimated 1-in-180-million odds to claim roughly $266,000; a December win by a roughly 270 TH/s setup that beat about 1-in-30,000 daily odds for around $284,661; and last week’s CKpool block 943,411, which paid roughly $210,000 and ended a 33-day gap without a CKpool block.