In brief
- A solo Bitcoin miner solved a block on Sunday—a rare feat these days.
- The independent miner took home around $365,000 in rewards and fees.
- Mining Bitcoin is a cutthroat industry; even the major players face challenges.
An independent Bitcoin miner hit the jackpot Sunday, outgunning the top mining operations that typically solve blocks on the leading cryptocurrency’s network.
A solo miner solved block 910,440 of the Bitcoin blockchain, bagging a 3.137 BTC reward—worth approximately $365,000 at current prices.
The block contained 4,913 transactions and was added by a miner using Solo CKPool—a service allowing anonymous miners to get started with a mining hook-up, without the need to run their own full Bitcoin node.
Miners currently receive 3.125 BTC plus transaction fees for adding a block to the flagship digital coin’s network.
It’s worth noting that a “solo miner” is just a mining operation using an independent pool that isn’t a big brand or publicly traded company that dominates the Bitcoin mining industry, such as Foundry, MARA, or Luxor.
Decrypt previously spoke with experts in the space who denied what outspoken influencers on Crypto X sometimes proclaimed: that a “solo miner” hitting the jackpot was necessarily a small operation with little computational power, solving blocks alone.
Once upon a time, people could mine Bitcoin from their laptops. But as the network has grown and difficulty has increased, miners now typically consist of industrial operations, or warehouses full of expensive computers.
Mining the biggest cryptocurrency has grown increasingly hard due to difficulty increases and the volatile nature of the digital coin’s price. Miners often have to sell coins or branch into different industries—like AI data centers—to cover operational costs.
Bitcoin was recently trading for $116,323 per coin, down more than 1% over a 24-hour period, according to CoinGecko.
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