Bitcoin solo miners have continued to make remarkable gains in securing block rewards, defying the competitive landscape of the cryptocurrency mining industry. This achievement was corroborated by Dr. Con Kolivas, a software engineer at Bitcoin CGMiner, highlighting the latest success on Saturday, October 28, 2023, when a miner using the Solo Ckpool platform secured the Bitcoin block reward for block 814,308 with just 11 petahash per second (PH/s) of hash power.
Solo Ckpool, specifically tailored for miners with less sophisticated hardware or lower hash rates, offers an exceptional advantage. Miners utilizing this platform can retain a substantial 99% of the block reward upon successfully discovering a new block. This marks a significant departure from traditional mining pools that distribute rewards evenly among all participants and empowers individual miners with increased autonomy.
The accomplishment in October is part of a growing trend rather than an isolated event. Earlier this year, there were multiple instances of solo mining triumphs. In August, a miner solved block 803,821 with just 1 PH/s of hash power, resulting in a substantial $160,000 reward. Furthermore, in June, a miner using an older Bitmain S9 device with a mere 17 terahash per second (TH/s) successfully uncovered block 793,607. In another impressive instance, a miner wielding a substantial 1 exahash per second (EH/s) hash power managed to mine two blocks in rapid succession, all without the backing of a large mining pool.
These accomplishments underscore the potential for individual miners to compete with and even surpass larger mining operations that traditionally dominate the industry. The appeal of solo mining pools lies in their unpredictability and independence, even in the face of high network difficulty. Mining a Bitcoin block is not solely determined by computational power; it often resembles a lottery where luck plays a crucial role in discovering new blocks.
Throughout the year, the Bitcoin hashrate has been on an upward trajectory, reaching its peak at 456 EH/s earlier this month before slightly dropping to 443 EH/s. Despite the network’s increasing difficulty, which now stands at 62.46T, the average block time has remained approximately 8 minutes and 52 seconds. Remarkably, these solo miners have not been deterred by the challenging mining environment and continue to secure substantial rewards.
