decrypt.co
A solo Bitcoin miner was rewarded for adding block 780,112 to Bitcoin’s blockchain, beating the odds as countless others raced toward the same goal.
The miner used the Solo CK Pool mining service to establish a solo mining pool, where they produced a valid hash for the block and received a reward of 6.25 BTC and a fee reward of around 0.63 BTC—worth about $148,000—according to BTC.com’s Bitcoin explorer.
A Twitter user pointed out how lucky the solo miner was to produce the valid hash, saying it would typically take a miner much longer to create a valid transaction given the limited computing power they used.
“A miner of this size will solve a block on average about once every 10 months,” Twitter user @ckpooldev stated. “They've only been mining solo for the last 2 days so has been very lucky.”
Congratulations to miner39nDQ9BexEBXpRdkHY1z95CaMDEwh6muPW who solved the 270th solo block at https://t.co/UWgBvLkDqc with 6.7PH but doesn't appear to have been mining for very long https://t.co/WGVBC3QajX
— Dr. Con Kolivas (@ckpooldev) March 10, 2023
The miner worked with an average hashing power of 6.7 PH/s (petahashes per second), according to @ckpooldev. Around the time that the block was added, Bitcoin’s total hash rate was around 308,262 PH/s, meaning the solo miner’s 6.7 PH/s hash rate represented roughly 0.002% of the blockchain’s entire computational power.
An account on the Bitcoin forum bitcointalk.org stepped forward to claim responsibility for producing the valid hash, saying he rented extra power for less than a day using a service called nicehash.
“Indeed, it is a great luck to catch a block with such a hashrate,” the user titled Pineconeeee stated on the forum. “In less than a day, luck smiled on me.”
The solo miner, who said they are from Russia, explained that they typically use a computing power of around 270 TH/s (terahashes per second) but rented 5 PH/s (petahashes per second) worth of power last Thursday, according to his post.
The block mined by the solo miner contained 3,220 transactions that consisted of around 16,940 worth of Bitcoin volume.
In order to add a block to a proof-of-work network like Bitcoin, miners continuously run calculations to discover a valid hash for the block, using a process akin to computational brute force.
These days, a majority of new blocks that are added to Bitcoin’s blockchain are mined via mining pools, where miners pool together their computing power to increase their chances of creating a valid hash.
Technically, it’s possible for a Bitcoin miner to get lucky every now and then and produce a valid hash on their own, despite the competition of other computers racing to calculate a valid hash for the next block on Bitcoin’s network.
According to BTC.com, the largest mining pool in the world is currently Foundry USA, a mining pool that comprises around 34% of the total hashrate on Bitcoin's network over the past day. The mining pool’s hashrate is around 107 EH/s (exahashes per second)—around 15,970 times more powerful than the solo miner.