The Bitcoin miner’s hash rate represented around 0.002% of the network’s total computational power. The block mined by the solo miner contained 3,220 transactions that consisted of around 16,940 worth of Bitcoin volume. A solo Bitcoin miner was rewarded for adding block 780,112 to Bitcoin’s blockchain, beating the odds as countless others raced toward the same goal.
The solo miner who produced the valid hash was lucky to have found it within such a short time frame, as it would typically take a miner much longer to create a valid transaction given the limited computing power they used. In fact, a miner of this size will solve a block on average about once every 10 months.
The miner who discovered the block had an average hashing power of 6.7 PH/s (petahashes per second). At the time the block was added to the blockchain, the total hash rate of Bitcoin was approximately 308,262 PH/s. This implies that the miner’s hash rate accounted for only 2% of the entire computational power of the blockchain. An account on the Bitcoin forum bitcointalk.org stepped forward to claim responsibility for producing the valid hash, saying he rented extra power for less than a day using a self-proclaimed “secret weapon.”
Although stories of solo miners hitting the jackpot are quite extraordinary, they are not as rare as many members of the crypto community may think. For example, in January 2022, a solo miner with a hash rate capacity of 126 TH/s produced a Bitcoin block with a reward worth $266,000. Although the number of bitcoins was the same, their dollar-denominated value was much higher back then.
When asked about the probability of mining a block with such a hashrate, Kolivas explained that the odds decrease over time. “You have about a 1 in 10,000 chance of finding a block per day with that hashrate, so one block on average every 10,000 days (but the chance keeps diminishing over time as global hashrate rises.)” In April 2022, an individual miner solved block 733,739 with twice as low hashrate of 60 TH/s. At that point, the 6.25 BTC reward was worth $244,000.
On March 12, the miner appeared on the Bitcointalk forum under the pseudonym Pineconeeee. The user from Russia had previously used a hashrate power of 270 TH /s, but rented additional 5 PH/s from the hash power broker NiceHash on March 9. It took less than a day for Pineconeeee to produce a block with increased power.
“A miner of this size will solve a block on average about once every 10 months, but they’ve only been mining solo for the last 2 days so have been very lucky. There is no way of knowing how many times they’ve intermittently pointed hashRussrate at solo CK Pool before though,” CK Pool founder Dr. Con Kolivas tweeted Friday.
