A SAMPLE THAT MONEY DOES NOT MAKE YOU INVINCIBLE AND THAT HAVING A LOT OF MONEY DOES NOT MEAN YOU CAN TRAMPLE OVER THOSE WHO HAVE LESS.
Large companies worldwide have spent exorbitant sums of money building Hives with immense computing power to mine BITCOIN, but a solo Bitcoin miner processed a block with a chance of 1 in every 187,000 years. An individual miner, using their own node and pool, managed to process a block at height 888989 of the network created by Nakamoto.
On March 22, 2025, a solo miner demonstrated the power of individual sovereignty on the Bitcoin (BTC) network by solving block 888989. They operated their own node provided by Umbrel and a self-hosted pool in Public Pool, an achievement that earned them an approximate reward of $266,000, without relying on intermediaries or large mining pools.
The 2,532 transactions included in block 888989 paid fees ranging from 1 to 107 satoshis per virtual byte (sat/vB), with a median rate of approximately 1 sat/vB, equivalent to $0.12. In total, transaction fees amounted to 0.027 BTC ($2,254), which, along with the block subsidy of 3.125 BTC ($264,298), established after the 2024 halving, resulted in the final reward of 3.152 BTC for the individual miner, according to data recorded in the mempool.space block explorer. Running a personal node, in this case through Umbrel, means that the miner validated and propagated transactions independently, without relying on third-party nodes. Likewise, by using Public Pool, a platform that allows users to set up their own solo mining pool, the miner avoided joining large mining pools that concentrate a significant portion of the global hashrate, such as Foundry USA or AntPool, which hold 32% and 18% of the total computing power contributed by pools to the Bitcoin network.
However, the feat of this extraordinarily rare domestic miner. At the moment the block was mined, the total hashrate of the Bitcoin network reached 833 EH/s (exahashes per second). By March 23, the global processing power of that network increased to 884 EH/s, according to mempool.space.
