Against all odds, a lone Bitcoin miner has just struck gold by processing a block of Bitcoin and earning little under $200,000 in compensation.
The Bitcoin block explorer Mempool.space reports that at 4:21 PM UTC, the miner completed processing block number 858,978. The miner earned $3.27 Bitcoin, or $199,094 at current rates, for their work in processing the 2,391 transactions in the block.
Notably, the Solo CK Poolâa unique kind of solo mining poolâwas the miner in charge of processing the block.
When the block was solved, the Solo CK miner used 456 petahashes of hashrate, according to statistics from Mempool.space.
With the network hashrate averaging 665 exahashes per second (EH/s) at the moment, the transaction processing miner was operating at a rate of around 0.012% of the average hashrate.
According to BitInfoCharts, the hashrate of Bitcoin reached an all-time high of 754 EH/s on July 23.
In spite of its name, the SoloCK "pool" solely gives the reward to the miner that solves the block; it does not aggregate the hashrate of smaller miners.
In the last year, the miner has solved 14 Bitcoin blocks and earned 59.3 Bitcoin, or $3.5 million at the current exchange rate.
Solo miners seldom succeed in validating a block because major mining companies like Riot Blockchain and Marathon Digital, which command enormous quantities of hash power, are so well-known.
Out of the 859,000 blocks generated since the launch of Bitcoin 14 years ago, a lone miner processing a block successfully is so uncommon that it has only happened about 290 times.
According to a March 2023 Cointelegraph article, a lone miner successfully solved a block and received the full 6.25 BTC reward. But at the time, the prize was worth about $150,000, and the price of Bitcoin was significantly lower.
The most recent block to be solo-mined was block 853,742, which was solved on July 25. The prize for solving this block was about $210,000.