Solo Bitcoin Miner Earns $330,386 Reward Amid Record Network Difficulty

A solo Bitcoin miner recently achieved a significant milestone by successfully mining block 899,826, earning a reward of $330,386. This accomplishment is particularly impressive given the current record-high network difficulty. The block, confirmed at 3:48 am UTC on June 5, included 3,680 transactions. The miner, operating under the Solo CK pool, received a subsidy of 3.125 Bitcoin (BTC) plus an additional 0.026 BTC in fees. The average fee per transaction in this block was around $0.29, with a median fee rate of approximately 2 satoshis per virtual byte (sat/vB), indicating relatively light network congestion at the time.

The miner's success is attributed to a significant increase in hashrate to 259 petahashes per second (PH/s), an unusually large amount for a solo miner. Con Kolivas, a software engineer and administrator of the solo mining pool ckpool, speculated that this hashrate was likely rented from a cloud or marketplace service. Kolivas noted that the miner's account had previously been mining on CKPool with a much lower hashrate, suggesting that the increased hashrate was a short-term rental used to attempt winning a block reward.

The mining difficulty for Bitcoin reached a new all-time high of 126.98 trillion on June 1, reflecting the intense competition among miners and the increasing network security. The mining difficulty is adjusted every 2,016 blocks and is driven by the network hashrate, which measures the total computational power dedicated to securing the network. With the current difficulty levels, the chances of an individual miner successfully solving a block are extremely low, making solo wins increasingly rare and intriguing.

This recent solo mining success comes amidst a rise in similar rare solo mining achievements this year. On March 10, a solo Bitcoin miner using a small, low-cost mining rig earned 3.15 BTC (worth $263,000 at the time) for solving block 887,212 via the solo.ckpool pool. Similarly, on February 10, another solo Bitcoin miner successfully mined block 883,181, earning a reward of 3.15 BTC (including fees), worth over $300,000 at the time. These instances highlight the occasional but significant rewards that solo miners can achieve despite the high difficulty levels.