Solo bitcoin miner wins ‘lottery,’ hauls in $288k with 0.00002% of network hashrate

A solo bitcoin miner, pseudonymously identified as 1Ng9~VoQz, successfully mined a valid block on the Bitcoin network Friday, claiming the 3.13 BTC block reward valued at approximately $288,383.50. 

Against the mathematical odds, the bitcoin miner achieved this with a hashrate (computing power) of 270 TH/s, or roughly 0.00002% of the bitcoin network’s total computing power.

Current bitcoin mining data indicates that a setup of this size has a 1 in 30,000 chance of solving a block on any given day. Given the chance, onlookers have equated the event to winning the bitcoin mining lottery.

This event marks the 310th instance of a solo miner securing a block reward under these specific tracking parameters, according to ckpooldev, the developer behind the CKPool software the miner used to mine the block.

As with past miners who mined a solo block, this winner received the full sum of the mining rewards (less a 2% fee to CKPool) directly rather than splitting it among other participants as they would have in a traditional mining pool model.

Most miners join mining pools to receive smaller and more frequent payouts, as pools combine the hashrate of many participants to solve blocks more regularly. These mining pools then distribute rewards proportionally according to the computing power each miner contributes to the pool.

Solo mining typically yields no return for long periods due to the high difficulty of the network. The volatility of this approach discourages most small-scale participants from operating without a pool.

The Bitcoin block reward is an intrinsic financial incentive provided to miners for mining a new Bitcoin block (the digital page in the letter that records bitcoin transactions). Miners earn both newly minted bitcoin from this block (called the block subsidy) and also bitcoin from the transaction fees users pay to use the Bitcoin network. The current Bitcoin subsidy sits at 3.125 BTC per block following the most recent Bitcoin block subsidy halving.