Explore the story of a Bitcoin solo miner’s triumph, securing a 3.125 BTC prize by validating a crucial block.
Rewards for validating block 841,286 brought in almost $200,000 for the miner who worked alone.
By solving a Bitcoin block on their own, a lone miner accomplished a remarkable feat and received the whole 3.125 Bitcoin (BTC) reward, which is currently valued at $62,327.
A miner has solved the 282nd solo block in the history of Bitcoin, according to Con Kolivas,a software developer and administrator from pool ckpool, who announced X on April 29.
He stated that the solo miner had a high hash rate of about 120 peta hashes (PH). This comes to around 0.12 exa hashes (EH). Their average hash rate during a week was about 12 PH. This equalo about 0.02% of the hash rate of the entire network.
Recently, there has been a lower value for solving 841,286. On April 20, during the Bitcoin halving at block 840,000, it dropped from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC. Due to this modification, the reward’s value, using the price of Bitcoin at the time, was around $200,000.
Kolivas looked into the summary of the block solution. He suggested that after halving, this big miner may have shifted from pooled mining. This change could be because they are unable to recoup their electrical expenses from pools. They seized the opportunity to attempt a solo block. As an alternative, Kolivas suggested that the miners may have been renting large amounts or hashing on occasion by themselves.
It is rare to mine a valid block alone, it’s comparable to winning the lottery. In the approximately 841,300 blocks that have been produced in Bitcoin’s 14-year lifetime, this incident has only occurred 282 times.
To solve and add the next block to the network, miners of Bitcoin must provide computational power.
As the asset’s value has increased, mining has gained a lot of popularity, As a result, there is now more competition or difficulty, and network horsepower, or hash rate, has increased. The block solution on its own has thus become impossible.
According to a March 2023 Cointelegraph article, a solo miner solved a block and received the whole 6.25 BTC reward. But the prize was about $150,000 back then because prices were cheaper.
On April 5, the last solo block occurred. It took place a few weeks before the halving. A solo miner with a 7 PH hash rate solved block 837,814 during this event. They received a reward of around $422,750 at that time.
Now, the network hash rate average is 618 EH/s (exa hashes per second). Bitinfocharts reports that on Apil 23, it hit an all-time high of 728 EH/s. In the previous 12 months, its hash rate climbed by almost 90%. This adds to the remarkable nature of the recent solo mining achievement.
