By working alone to solve a Bitcoin block and earn the entire 3.125 Bitcoin BTC block reward, one Bitcoin miner has defied the odds.
Con Kolivas, a software engineer and pool administrator for ckpool, announced on X on April 29 that a miner had cracked the 282nd solo block in Bitcoin history.
He continued by saying that the single miner had a high hash rate at the time of about 120PH (peta hashes), which is comparable to about 0.12 EH (exa hashes). Over the course of a week, the average hash rate was about 12PH, or about 0.02% of the network's overall hash rate.
In the recent Bitcoin halving at block 840,000 on April 20, the reward for solving block 841,286 was lowered from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC, meaning it was worth around $200,000 at BTC prices at the time.
Kolivas looked over the block-solve description and speculated that this big miner would have just moved to solo mining for a chance at a solo block, or switched from pooled mining post-halving "presumably for no longer recouping their electricity costs." That or, he continued, they have been "occasionally hashing/renting large amounts solo."
The accomplishment is noteworthy because mining a legitimate block by yourself is as uncommon as winning the lottery. Only 282 times in the roughly 841,300 blocks that have been created since Bitcoin's creation 14 years ago has it happened, demonstrating how uncommon it is.
Computational power must be contributed by miners in order to solve and add the next block to the network.
But as the asset's value has grown, mining has become incredibly popular, raising competition, sometimes referred to as difficulty, and hash rate, or network horsepower, making it nearly impossible to break a block on your own.
A few weeks before to the halving, on April 5, a lone miner solved block 837,814 with a 7PH hash rate, earning a reward of around $422,750 at the time. This was the most recent solo block solved.
According to Bitinfocharts, the average network hash rate is currently 618 EH/s (exa hashes per second), down from an all-time high of 728 EH/s on April 23. It has grown by over 90% in the last 12 months, which makes the most recent single mining accomplishment even more remarkable.
April 2024, Cryptoniteuae