Solo Bitcoin miner nets 3.16 BTC block (~$200K)

A solo miner mined Bitcoin block 960,804 at 02:11 UTC Monday and received 3.15689830 BTC, comprising the 3.125 BTC subsidy and 0.03289830 BTC in transaction fees. The block contained 4,243 transactions and the BTC payout was worth about $200,000 at the time.

The block was reported through Solo CKPool. The pool’s pseudonymous developer, Dr -ck, named the winning address as bc1qdyqjq9qccp34pyv3kxmsrkn7p0amnsqqy8kdeq and confirmed the payout details. CKPool recorded this as the 317th solo block found through its service. CKPool lets miners point hardware at its infrastructure without running a full Bitcoin node and takes a 2% fee on any block reward.

Dr -ck posted that the winning hashrate was “wildly variable — presumably rental — peaking at 100PH.” The developer also wrote: “Despite the chaos from the hardware wallet exploit, bitcoin just keeps on doing…” and congratulated the mining address.

At the time of the find, the Bitcoin network hashrate was about 924 exahashes per second. A 100 petahash peak represents roughly 0.011% of that total, a share that would on average produce one block about every 64 days. A single 100 terahash-per-second machine represents about one-thousandth of that share, giving odds near 1 in 62,750 on any given day and an average wait of about 172 years for a solo block.

Solo mining covers a range from single-machine hobby setups to services that let participants mine without hosting their own full node. Some solo winners appear to use rented or variable cloud capacity that spikes briefly, raising the short-term chance of finding a block.

Solo blocks have appeared steadily in recent months. Reported solo payouts have included about $225,000 in April from a 70 TH/s miner, a $210,000 payout a week earlier, and earlier finds that paid roughly $266,000, $365,000 and $350,000. The dollar value of each payout varies with Bitcoin’s market price while the BTC reward stays fixed.

The block subsidy remains 3.125 BTC until the next scheduled halving at block 1,050,000, expected in spring 2028, when the subsidy will drop to 1.5625 BTC. At the time of the block, Bitcoin traded near $63,700. The recent hardware wallet exploit has been linked to losses estimated at about $114 million.