For the third time in a little over ten days, a solo bitcoin miner has found a valid block hash to take the full coinbase reward home. The small worker, with only about 86 terahashes per second (TH/s) of hashrate capacity, managed to successfully mine a new block on the Bitcoin network, earning a block reward of 6.25 BTC and over 0.30 BTC in fees.
“Congratulations to another miner with approximately 86TH solving a solo block on http://solo.ckpool.org,” tweeted Solo CK Pool administrator, Dr. Con Kolivas. “There are a lot more miners now on the solo pool and if enough people are mining solo, someone will eventually be the lucky one as here.”
Although the lucky miner had about 86 TH/s of average hashrate capacity over the past seven days, it seems they had less than 10% of that on board when it was able to successfully mine a full block.
“Note this miner had been varying the amount of hashrate they were mining solo with, and at the time they solved it only had 8.3TH on board,” Kolivas said in a reply tweet.
The solo miner added block number 720175 to the Bitcoin blockchain at about 6 am UTC on Monday to kickstart the workweek earning over $215,000 in unseizable hard money.
Solo CK Pool miners have found luck more than once in the past couple of weeks. On January 11, a solo miner with 120 TH/s hit the jackpot by successfully adding a new block to the Bitcoin blockchain and receiving a reward of over $270,000 at the time. Only a couple of days later, another solo worker, with 116 TH/s, also managed to find a valid block and take over $260,000 in rewards when the block was added to Bitcoin.
“To be clear, this is not a sentinel event, there is nothing wrong with proof of work, bitcoin is not broken, my solo mining service doesn’t have a back door to solve blocks faster,” Kolivas said in another reply tweet, given the increased number of solo miners in his pool that have been able to add a new block. “With enough miners mining, someone eventually solves a block, and it can be a miner of any size.”
