Individual Bitcoin Miner Wins $222,000 Bitcoin Lottery After Securing An Entire Block Reward

In an astonishing turn of events, a solo Bitcoin (BTC) miner beat a swathe of powerful mining pools to net themselves a payday of just over $222,000 after successfully processing a block on Thursday’s leading crypto network.

Solo Miner Beats The Odds

The lucky miner processed block number 867,118 at 4:18 am Eastern Time, according to blockchain data. A total of 3,285 transactions were contained in the block, and the miner pocketed ‎3.329 BTC, or just $222,455, as a reward for the work.

The miner responsible for processing the block was the Solo CK Pool, a solo that usually merges the hashrate of small miners but only gives the reward to the miner responsible for solving the block.

Bitcoin blocks are produced roughly every 10 minutes and are typically mined by large mining pools, which combine computing power to give them the best possible chance of pocketing the block reward. The reward to successfully mine a block sits currently at 3.125 BTC, after the April 20 quadrennial halving event.

Mining has gotten more difficult over the years as the network has grown in size and become more secure. Bitcoin’s hashrate recently hit an all-time high of 769.8 EH/s. Right now, the Chinese pool Antpool and ViaBTC — the mining pool that mined the first block after the recent Bitcoin halving — control 38% of the total hashrate of the Bitcoin network.

As a result, a solo miner winning a block is akin to winning a lottery. Still, it is not a rare occurrence for a solo miner to find a block; it is just a low-probability event directly tied to the miner’s ability to solve complex cryptographic puzzles within the network.

Last month, another solo miner hit the jackpot by solving block 860,749 and taking home a 3.169 BTC reward — worth around $181,143 at the time.