Investment, luck, and persistence.
It's harder than ever to mine Bitcoin, but individual miners occasionally persevere and take home a huge reward.
Apparently, Bitcoin's solo miners are having a great year, despite the ever-increasing difficulty of minting the world's most important digital currency.
A solo miner managed to process a block on the Bitcoin network in (October 2024) and took home a total of 3,329 BTC, valued at the time at $222,438 (around R$ 1.28 million) as a reward. Blockchain data shows that the block contained 3,285 transactions.
Bitcoin mining is the energy-intensive work of processing blocks on the cryptocurrency's network. The blocks are filled with transaction data and are part of Bitcoin's blockchain — an almost impenetrable ledger and one of the most secure computing networks in the world.
When blocks are processed, miners receive newly minted coins: a fixed reward of 3.125 BTC, along with transaction fees paid by those using the network during that specific block window.
In the past, almost anyone could participate in the mining process and mint new coins at home. However, as the network grew, the mining difficulty increased substantially. Now, mining operations are typically run in warehouses by large companies — and consume a lot of electricity.
Bitcoin mining became much more difficult in April, when the network underwent its quadrennial halving: an event embedded in the network's code that cuts miners' rewards in half every four years. Mining operations now need to work harder and receive less Bitcoin for their efforts.
Before the last halving, miners received 6.25 Bitcoin for each block they processed. Prior to that, the reward was 12.5 BTC; and before that, 25 BTC. When the Bitcoin blockchain was first launched in 2009, the mining reward was 50 BTC.
While miners receive less Bitcoin every four years, they manage their operations and stay in the game because the value of the cryptocurrency has been growing since the network's inception. Since Bitcoin's first halving in 2012, the coin has risen 548,604% to a current price of around $67,000.
But solo miners exist and occasionally — though rarely — they may get lucky and process a block on their own. In the last year, solo miners earned significantly in April, July, August, and September, before this latest lucky occurrence.
