Solo Bitcoin Miner Hits Jackpot, Scoring $200K BTC Reward

A solo Bitcoin miner solved block 960,804 at 02:11 UTC on Monday, netting a reward worth about $200,000.

The block paid 3.15689830 $BTC, made up of the 3.125 $BTC subsidy and 0.032 $BTC in fees from the 4,243 transactions it carried. It was the 317th solo block found through CKPool, the pseudonymous developer known as Dr -ck said, naming the winning address as bc1qdyqjq9qccp34pyv3kxmsrkn7p0amnsqqy8kdeq.

The odds

Bitcoin mining pits machines against each other to solve a cryptographic puzzle, with the winner taking the block reward—currently 3.125 $BTC, a figure that halves roughly every four years.

This one was less of a lottery ticket than most. Dr -ck described the winner as running “a wildly variable – presumably rental – hashrate peaking at 100PH.” Network hashrate stood at 924 exahashes per second, per mempool.space, so that peak amounted to roughly 0.011% of the network, or one block every 64 days or so. A hobbyist with a single 100 TH/s machine runs a thousandth of that, with odds nearer 1 in 62,750 on any given day—an average wait of 172 years.

Solo finds keep happening, though the term encompasses a broad church, from “hobby miners” using sub-$1,000 rigs like the Bitaxe and FutureBit Apollo, to services like Solo CKPool—which lets anonymous miners get started with a mining hook-up, without requiring them to run their own full Bitcoin node.

Recent winners

Solo blocks have come at a steady clip. A miner running 70 TH/s took $225,000 in April, a week after another scored $210,000. Earlier finds brought $266,000, $365,000 and $350,000. The varying dollar values track Bitcoin’s price rather than any change in the odds. The reward itself is fixed at 3.125 $BTC until the next halving at block 1,050,000, around 89,000 blocks away and expected in the spring of 2028, when it drops to 1.5625 $BTC.

CKPool lets solo miners point hardware at its infrastructure without running a full node, taking a 2% cut of any block found. Dr -ck noted the block arrived “despite the chaos” from the recent exploit of the Coldcard hardware wallet, which has seen losses estimated at $114 million.

Bitcoin changed hands at around $63,700 Monday, up 1.1% on the day, per CoinGecko data. On prediction market Myriad, owned by Decrypt’s parent company Dastan, users remain bearish on Bitcoin’s outlook, placing a 68% chance on the cryptocurrency’s next move taking it to $55,000.