- Bitcoin’s mining ecosystem has experienced a rare event in the past 24 hours
- A solo miner defeated large mining pools to successfully process a block
Solo miners are rarely successful at mining blocks. Mainly because this is the era of large mining pools, all of which possess vast amounts of hash power. That’s why it’s news when solo miners hit the jackpot.
That was also the case a few hours ago after a single miner successfully processed block number 858,978. For this, the miner received a reward of approximately 3.27 BTC, almost $200,000.
In this particular case, the miner was a certain Solo CK Pool. The miner used a hashrate of only 456 petahashes/sec, compared to an industry average of 665 exahashes/sec. In light of the fact that Bitcoin mining is a highly competitive business, where large mining pools have a significant advantage, the chances of a solo miner processing a block are generally quite low.
However, here it is worth pointing out that, as far as Bitcoin itself is concerned, the cryptocurrency’s hashrate did not reach an ATH until July 23. However, it has fallen significantly since then. At the time of writing, a recovery was on the horizon as this had risen to 656 exahashes/sec after falling to 591 exahashes/sec in the last 24 hours.
Source: BitInfoCharts
Solo CK Pool, despite its name, does not function as a regular mining pool. Despite using a combination of the hashing power of small miners, the actual block rewards only go to the single miner responsible for the block in question. That explains why the pool operator congratulated the miner involved with X. He shared,
“Congratulations to miner 36AisvWi1UiwLTeTZxLzindAkorqeUc3tT for solving the 291st solo block! This hefty miner with 38PH solved a block on average once every ~4 months.”
Due to how rare it is, there are only a few recorded cases of individual miners successfully processing a block. Especially since huge mining pools with significant hashing power emerged. However, the last time this happened was in July, when a miner received a reward of more than $210,000.