Talk about winning the lottery. One solo miner walked away with more than $200,000 in Bitcoin while borrowing just $75 in hash power.
A miner verified block 938,092 at around 8:04 AM (UTC) on Tuesday, earning the full amount of 3.125. $BTC According to blockchain data from Mempool.space, it uses hashrate rented through on-demand cloud services to block rewards.
The miner spent about 119,000 Satoshis (about $75) to rent 1 Petahash per second of computing power and used CKPool, a service that allows individual miners to work independently while relying on pool servers to broadcast and send solutions.
Calculating that return is ridiculous. This is a 2,600x profit, which equates to a lottery with better odds than most real-world lotteries.
The Bitcoin network processes transactions by bundling them into blocks, which are added to the blockchain approximately every 10 minutes. Miners compete to solve cryptographic puzzles for the right to add each block, and winners receive rewards.
Competition is measured by hashrate, or the amount of computing power that miners put into the puzzle. As the hashrate increases, the number of guesses per second increases and the probability increases.
statistically rare
Renting a petahash for a solo miner is like bringing a slingshot to a gunfight. The probability of that 1 petahash solving a block before any industrial activity takes place is very small, about the same as finding one particular grain of sand on the beach.
But someone has to win each block, and the odds don’t care about size. So, while singly mined blocks are still statistically rare, they are no longer as rare as they used to be.
According to data from solo mining aggregator Bennet, 21 individual miners have successfully verified blocks in the past year, earning a total of 66 profits. $BTC Equivalent to $4.1 million at current prices. This represents a 17% year-over-year increase in discovered solo blocks, with one landing on average approximately every 17 days.
The rise of on-demand hashrate rental has lowered the barrier to entry.
Miners no longer need to own physical hardware to make shots. Cloud-based services allow anyone to rent computing power for just a few dollars, turning solo mining from an infrastructure-intensive operation to something more like scratch-off cards with transparent odds.
Meanwhile, the lucky block landed at an interesting moment for the Bitcoin mining economy.
After the latest adjustment, the network difficulty increased to 144.4 trillion. That was a 15% increase, reversing an 11% decline caused by severe winter storms in the United States earlier this month. This increase means that miners now need an average of 144.4 trillion hash attempts to find a valid block compared to the first block in 2009.
This drop due to the storm is the steepest hashrate drop since China’s mining ban in 2021, temporarily making blocks easier to find until the network rebalances.
And for one miner who had $75 and good timing, that slot was enough.
