A solo participant on the Bitcoin network has secured a windfall of more than $200,000 after successfully mining block 938,092 with just $75 worth of rented hashpower.
Data from Mempool.space indicates the block was validated at approximately 8:04 a.m. UTC on Tuesday. The miner earned the full 3.125 BTC block subsidy after leasing 1 petahash per second (PH/s) of computing power through an on-demand cloud mining marketplace, spending roughly 119,000 satoshis — about $75 — for the attempt.
The miner routed the effort through CKPool, a platform that allows individuals to mine independently while using shared infrastructure to broadcast completed blocks to the network. Unlike traditional pooled mining, where rewards are distributed proportionally among contributors, a solo miner retains 100% of the payout upon successfully solving a block.
The return equates to roughly 2,600 times the original outlay — a striking illustration of the asymmetric payoff structure in small-scale mining. While the probabilities are publicly calculable, the odds of a miner operating at 1 PH/s competing against industrial-scale farms are extremely low.
Bitcoin adds a new block approximately every 10 minutes. Miners compete to solve a cryptographic puzzle, and the first to produce a valid solution receives the block reward plus transaction fees. Success is largely determined by hashrate — the volume of computational guesses generated per second. Greater hashrate increases the likelihood of finding a block.
With only a single petahash at its disposal, the solo miner represented a minute fraction of the network’s total computing power. Statistically, the probability of outpacing major mining operations is slim, but not impossible.
According to data compiled by solo mining tracker Bennet, 21 individual miners have independently validated blocks over the past year, collectively earning 66 BTC — valued at roughly $4.1 million at current market prices. That marks a 17% increase year over year, with a solo block found approximately every 17 days on average.
The expansion of cloud-based hashrate rentals has lowered the barrier to entry. Participants no longer need to own or operate specialized hardware to attempt solo mining. Instead, they can lease computing power for relatively modest amounts, effectively turning the process into a probability-driven wager with transparent odds.
The win occurred amid shifting mining conditions. Network difficulty recently climbed 15% to 144.4 trillion, reversing an 11% decline earlier in the month after severe winter storms in the United States temporarily disrupted mining activity. That weather-related drop briefly made blocks easier to find before the automatic difficulty adjustment restored competitive balance.
At current levels, miners collectively require an average of 144.4 trillion hash attempts to discover a valid block — a dramatic increase compared with the network’s early days in 2009, when competition was minimal.
For one miner willing to allocate $75 in rented hashpower at the right moment, that narrow statistical window proved sufficient to capture a six-figure reward.
