SOLO

A 'whale' solo Bitcoin miner with a whopping 1.14PH/s computing power solved a valid block on Tuesday.

Hopium is back on the menu for solo Bitcoin (BTC) miners. A circa $240,000 reward, or 6.25 BTC, was generated by yet another solo miner this morning. 

This time, the odds were less than 20%, according to Con Kolivas, a Bitcoin software engineer and administrator for ckpool, whose name takes his initials. It’s the fourth “blockfind” for the ckpool since Jan. 11. 

Kolivas tweeted his congratulations to the miner who joins the ranks of the few and fortunate successful solo BTC miners.

Congratulations to a miner with 1.14PH who solved the 264th solo Bitcoin block at https://t.co/UWgBvLkDqc ! https://t.co/5BsWlYkYJt There was once again ~20% chance that one of the miners at the pool would have solved a block by now. pic.twitter.com/NrlAbhhKCk

— Dr. Con Kolivas (@ckpooldev) February 1, 2022

The plucky miner belongs to the Solo ckpool, the service that offers anonymous solo Bitcoin mining with a fee. At 1.14 petahashes per second (PH/s), the miner is considered a ‘whale’ miner, with a considerable hash rate for one single entity.

A new BTC block is solved roughly every 10 minutes by miners competing against the entire bitcoin network hashrate. By way of comparison, United States Bitcoin miners Foundry are currently the largest contributors to the network hash rate, with 33,803 PH/s.

One Twitter user estimated that while 1.14PH/s is a lot, it is still less than a room full of S19s, the flagship mining product by Antminer.

Related: Bitcoin miners believe global hash rate to grow ‘aggressively’

The ckpool has taken the mining world by storm recently. A Bitcoin miner with a tiny hash rate of just 126 terahashes per second (TH/s)–possibly a single S19 machine–solved a valid block on January 12th. Two weeks later, another underdog with a mere 86 TH/s achieved the improbable by solving another valid block.

Over the course of the Bitcoin blockchain’s existence, 264 blocks or 0.037% of the circa 721,240 blocks were solved by ck’s solo Bitcoin miners. While the odds are clearly against the soloists, they continue to surprise and delight Bitcoiners.