• Bitcoin’s mining ecosystem saw a rare occurrence in the last 24 hours
• A solo miner trumped major mining pools to successfully process a block

Solo miners are rarely successful when mining blocks. Mostly because it’s the era of major mining pools, with each holding massive amounts of hash power. That is the reason why when solo miners do hit the jackpot, it’s news.

So was the case a few hours ago after a singular miner successfully processed Block number 858,978. For doing so, the miner received a reward of around 3.27 BTC, close to around $200,000.

In this particular case, the miner was a certain Solo CK Pool. The miner used a hashrate of just 456 petahashes/sec against an industry average of 665 exahashes/sec. In light of the fact that Bitcoin mining is a highly competitive business, one where large mining pools have a significant advantage, the odds of a solo miner processing a block are generally pretty low.

Here, it’s worth pointing out though that as far as Bitcoin itself is concerned, the cryptocurrency’s hashrate hit an ATH as recently as 23 July. Since then, however, it has fallen significantly. In fact, at the time of writing, recovery was in the offing as the same had risen to 656 exahashes/sec after falling to 591 exahashes/sec over the last 24 hours.

Solo CK Pool, despite its name, doesn’t operate as a regular mining pool though. In fact, despite a combination of small miners’ hash power being used, the actual block rewards only goes to the singular miner responsible for the block in question. That explains why the pool’s admin congratulated the miner involved on X. He shared,

“Congratulations to miner 36AisvWi1UiwLTeTZxLzindAkorqeUc3tT for solving the 291st solo block! This hefty miner with 38PH would solve a block on average once every ~4 months.”

Because of how rare it is, there are only a few recorded instances of singular miners successfully processing a block. Especially since huge mining pools with significant hash power came to being. The last time it happened was just back in July though, when a miner picked up a reward of upwards of $210,000.