In a rare and remarkable event, an independent miner found and validated an entire Bitcoin block, earning 3.1 BTC in rewards, worth around $200,000, early Tuesday. The miner reportedly achieved the feat by using a small-scale setup and spending about 119,000 SATS ($75) on rented computing power.
According to Bitcoin mining firm Braiins, the miner successfully mined block 938092 after renting 1 petahash per second (PH/s) of hashpower via Braiins’ on-demand service – a marketplace that allows users to rent mining capacity without needing to install or operate any physical hardware themselves.
Solo Miner Rents Hashrate for $75 to Validate Block, Wins 3.12 BTC Reward
Based on the current network hash rate of 1.184 zetahashes per second (ZH/s), the miner’s output would only have a success rate of 1 in 1.1 million blocks, or about 21 years’ worth of mining. This is a rare feat because most Bitcoin blocks are found by large mining pools that have dedicated massive amounts of computational resources from many miners to solving the cryptographic puzzles that underpin the blockchain.
The operation was coordinated using CKPool, a platform that allows solo miners to broadcast and submit block solutions while retaining full block rewards if successful. Meanwhile, the rented hashrate model lets hobby miners and smaller operators participate in Bitcoin mining without a massive upfront investment.
On-demand hashrate essentially functions like a cloud-based mining service, allowing miners to rent SHA-256 compute temporarily and point it at a mining pool or network target. Solo mining has become an extremely rare phenomenon as the Bitcoin network’s total hashrate and mining difficulty have climbed much higher since its inception in 2009.
However, the act, likened by experts to playing the lottery, has provided a handful of winners of late. Last month, two solo miners won 3.1 BTC in rewards, worth $300,000 at the time, and in December, another miner beat the odds to score more than $280,000 in block rewards.
Bennet data shows that only 21 solo miners have found a Bitcoin block over the past year, winning a total of 66 BTC, worth approximately $4.1 million at current prices. This figure represents roughly one solo block every 17.2 days on average – a rate that is a fraction of the thousands of blocks produced daily across the Bitcoin network.
Nevertheless, these solo victories, achieved either with home-based rigs, small miners, or rented compute, stand out as a statistical outlier similar to winning a lottery rather than an indicator of a broader shift in the mining sector.
Bitcoin Hashrate Falls to 2021 China-Ban Lows, as Weather Anomalies in Key Regions Disrupt Mining
The event also occurred against the backdrop of recent volatility in mining difficulty, with the recent winter storms temporarily taking many large-scale miners offline in key regions, resulting in the rate dropping by 11% – the sharpest decline in hashpower since China’s 2021 crackdown on crypto mining. However, Bitcoin’s mining difficulty rate rebounded sharply by 15% to 144.4 trillion following the latest adjustment.
This adjustment, which occurs once every 2,016 blocks, or roughly every 2 weeks, is critical to maintaining the blockchain’s average block time to approximately 10 minutes and calibrating the computational effort required to discover new blocks.
Events like weather disruptions, miner shutdowns, or equipment turnover can cause big swings in Bitcoin’s hashpower. But they temporarily create conditions where bets based on lower-cost, rented hashrate have better odds of finding a block and mining bitcoin than usual.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin (BTC) is trading at $65,041 – up 2.98% in 24 hours.
