A lone Bitcoin miner with just 6 terahashes per second (TH/s)—an almost imperceptible share of the network—managed to mine a full BTC block on Friday, collecting 3.146 BTC plus fees, worth nearly $265,000.
The achievement was confirmed by Con Kolivas, creator of the Solo CK pool, who said the miner faced “only a one in 180 million chance” of finding a block on any given day.
The miner controls a tiny 0.0000007% of Bitcoin’s total network hashpower, which recently reached a record 855.7 exahashes per second (EH/s).
This block marks the 308th mined via CKpool since its 2014 launch and the first in roughly three months. CKpool allows miners to solo mine while leveraging the pool’s infrastructure, letting the winning wallet keep the full reward minus a 2% fee.
Friday’s win ranks among the luckiest solo-mined blocks in recent memory. In 2022, a solo miner with 126 TH/s beat odds of roughly 1 in 1.3 million to secure a block—but the tiny scale of Friday’s miner compared to the total network hash rate makes this latest outcome far more improbable.
The winning miner had submitted shares as usual, but with only 6 TH/s—roughly the output of a single older-generation ASIC—finding a block would normally take hundreds of years of continuous mining.
Solo mining has become increasingly rare as Bitcoin’s hash rate climbs. While this strengthens network security, it dramatically reduces the likelihood that small miners can capture a block, making Friday’s success an extraordinary stroke of luck
