The lucky solo Bitcoin miner processed a block with a reward of 3.137 BTC, or $349,028, late Thursday night.
In brief
Block 903,883 was processed by a solo miner that pocketed a sweet reward of $349,028.
One expert believes this solo miner would have only solved a block once every eight years, due to their tiny hash rate.
The solo miner had just 0.000847% of the hash rate of the previous block's miner, Foundry USA.
Ding ding ding—we have a winner!
A solo miner bagged a reward of 3.173 BTC ($349,028) by mining Bitcoin block number 903,883 late Thursday night. Winners like this don’t come around often; in fact, one expert says an underdog this small will only win every eight years on average.
Thursday night’s lucky winner was identified as using Solo CK, a non-profit service that enables Bitcoin miners to attempt to mine solo blocks. By using Solo CK, the miner paid a 2% fee but avoided the overhead required to run a high-end Bitcoin mining rig.
“Congratulations to miner bc1q~9sj3 with 2.3PH for solving block number 301,” the pseudonymous Dr. CK, software engineer and admin for Solo CK, wrote on X. “A miner of this size has about a 1 in 2,800 chance of solving a block every day, or once every 8 years on average.”
To put this into perspective, 2.3PH, short for petahashes, works out as a slither of Bitcoin’s total estimated hash rate of 881.11 EH/s, short for exahash. That’s just 0.00026% of the hash rate to be exact. When compared to Foundry USA’s hash rate, the mining pool that processed the block prior, the solo miner still pales in comparison with just 0.000847% of Foundry’s 271.7 EH/s hash rate.
Bitcoin miners spend computational power to solve complex mathematical equations to find what is called a “nonce,” which is short for “number used once.” That number makes the block meet Bitcoin’s difficulty requirement, which is constantly adjusting, and allows the block to be added to the blockchain.
The miner is then rewarded with newly minted Bitcoin and the transaction fees included in that block. Bitcoin mining is the underpinning of the proof-of-work consensus mechanism.