A single Bitcoin (BTC) miner collected a full block reward on Jan. 13, claiming 3.125 BTC plus charges price near $300,000 at present costs.
The win wasn’t break up amongst hundreds of pool members. One deal with acquired the complete payout in an business dominated by industrial-scale mining operations commanding exahashes of compute energy.
However solo miners nonetheless handle to search out blocks, not as a result of the chances are favorable, however as a result of likelihood does not care about expectations.
The mathematics is brutal. Bitcoin’s community hashrate sits round 1,024 exahashes per second as of mid-January 2026, in accordance with Hashrate Index. That is roughly 1.024 billion terahashes competing to unravel every block.
A interest miner operating a 6 TH/s ASIC faces roughly a 1-in-170-million likelihood per block try. The anticipated wait time to discover a single block at that hashrate exceeds 3,000 years.
But solo wins maintain showing, with verified solo blocks hitting the chain each few weeks.
Mining is a Poisson course of (a statistics mannequin for random occasions occurring over time), a memoryless lottery the place every try is impartial. The hashrate determines the likelihood per block, however likelihood does not implement easy distribution over quick timescales.
A miner operating a 6 TH/s miner for a month has a 0.0025% likelihood of discovering no less than one block. That is practically zero, but it surely’s not zero. Multiply that tiny likelihood throughout tens of hundreds of solo miners globally, and somebody hits the jackpot recurrently.
Solo mining tracker information compiled by Bennet reveals 22 verified solo blocks mined over the previous 12 months, with a median interval of 15.6 days between wins.
How solo mining truly works in 2026
Most solo wins come by means of solo mining companies like Solo CKPool, which gives Stratum work coordination so particular person miners can compete for full block rewards with out operating the complete stack themselves.
CKPool explicitly frames its service as “not a pool” within the financial sense, as there isn’t any reward splitting amongst members. Every miner’s hashrate competes independently for the complete block reward.
If a miner linked to Solo CKPool finds a sound block, the coinbase transaction pays that miner’s deal with straight, minus a 2% service price. At the moment, solely CKPool reveals round 20,950 customers contributing roughly 188 petahashes of hashrate.
A more moderen mannequin is run-your-own solo pool software program, exemplified by Public Pool within the Umbrel ecosystem. This open-source utility lets miners run a solo mining pool utilizing their very own node, retaining the complete reward in the event that they hit a block. It removes the service price however requires extra technical setup.
What all fashions share is that the miner receives the complete block reward for a profitable discover, quite than a proportional share based mostly on contributed hashrate over time.
Both the miner wins the whole lot or wins nothing.
Odds are worse than anticipated, however higher than by no means
At Bitcoin’s present community hashrate of roughly 1,024 EH/s, a miner’s likelihood of discovering any given block equals their hashrate divided by the community’s complete hashrate.
For a 6 TH/s gadget, that is roughly one in 170 million per block.
Anticipated time to search out one block scales inversely with that likelihood. Since Bitcoin produces a block roughly each 10 minutes, a 6 TH/s miner would anticipate to attend round 3,247 years to discover a single block.
A extra highly effective 200 TH/s ASIC would nonetheless take round 97 years to succeed in 1 TH/s. Even at 1 petahash, the anticipated wait drops to 19.5 years.
However anticipated time isn’t the identical as likelihood over a hard and fast interval. A 6 TH/s miner has roughly a 0.0308% likelihood of discovering no less than one block over a full yr. But throughout hundreds of miners operating comparable setups, a number of will beat these odds.
Because of this solo mining wins are inclined to cluster round mid-range hashrate ranges. A miner operating 2.3 petahashes, far beneath industrial scale however nicely above hobbyist {hardware}, has roughly an 11% likelihood of discovering a block inside a yr.
Over a big sufficient inhabitants of miners in that vary, wins turn into predictable in mixture even when any particular person miner stays unlikely to succeed.
Latest solo wins present the sample holding
Solo block discoveries have maintained a gradual cadence over the previous yr. Block 920,440, mined on Oct. 23, 2025, was awarded to a Public Pool miner, who collected 3.125 BTC plus roughly 0.016 BTC in charges.
Block 924,569 on Nov. 21, 2025, delivered roughly 3.146 BTC to a solo miner working by means of CKPool infrastructure.
One dramatic instance occurred on Nov. 23, 2025, when a miner operating simply 6 TH/s, dealing with odds of about 1 in 170 million per block, efficiently discovered a block by means of CKPool and claimed the complete reward.
FutureBit, which manufactures compact Bitcoin mining gadgets designed for dwelling use, has documented a number of solo wins from Apollo miners. These gadgets usually run within the single-digit or low-double-digit terahash vary, being too small to generate significant pool rewards however nonetheless able to often discovering blocks.
Bennet’s solo mining tracker, which aggregates verified solo blocks throughout CKPool, Public Pool, FutureBit gadgets, and different identified solo setups, reveals 22 solo blocks discovered over the previous 12 months, up 29% year-over-year.
The typical interval between solo wins throughout all tracked setups is 15.6 days, with the longest drought lasting 54 days. Complete rewards distributed to solo miners over that interval sum to roughly 69.35 BTC.
Why solo mining exists in any respect
The financial case for solo mining is weak if optimized for regular revenue.
Pool mining pays proportionally to the contributed hashrate, smoothing variance into predictable payouts. A miner contributing 200 TH/s to a pool receives roughly their share of that pool’s rewards, delivered repeatedly.
A solo miner with 200 TH/s receives nothing for years, then instantly receives 3.125 BTC plus charges.
The anticipated worth is an identical, each approaches converge to the identical long-term return per unit of hashrate, however the variance profile is totally totally different. Industrial miners have debt service, operational prices, and electrical energy contracts that require predictable income.
Variance is an unhedgeable danger.
Solo mining persists as a result of a subset of miners values the variance itself. Some run mining {hardware} as a interest or ideological dedication quite than a profit-maximizing enterprise.
The psychological attraction of doubtless profitable a full block outweighs the near-certainty of incomes nothing. Others deal with solo mining as a lottery ticket, economically irrational on an expected-value foundation, however defensible as leisure or a tail-risk wager.
Infrastructure enhancements have additionally lowered technical limitations. Operating a solo mining operation in 2015 required working a full Bitcoin node, configuring Stratum software program, and managing community connectivity.
CKPool and Public Pool cut back that setup to pointing mining {hardware} at a URL or putting in a plug-and-play app. The simpler it turns into to solo mine, the extra miners will attempt it, and the extra seen solo wins will turn into.
The block that simply hit
The Jan. 13 block represents the most recent information level in a well-established sample.
A single deal with acquired the complete block reward price near $300,000 at Bitcoin’s worth of round $94,000. The payout construction suggests the win got here by means of solo mining infrastructure. Nonetheless, with no public declare from the miner or a verified pool tag within the coinbase, the precise setup stays ambiguous.
If the miner used Solo CKPool, the web payout could be 98% of the full after the service price. If it got here by means of Public Pool or correct solo infrastructure, the miner saved the complete quantity.
Both method, the win validates that solo mining continues to perform precisely as likelihood predicts: largely silent, often spectacular.
The community will produce one other 144 blocks at the moment. The overwhelming majority of rewards will movement to industrial mining operations. However someplace in that stream of blocks, one other solo miner will finally hit.
The chances have not improved. The problem hasn’t dropped. The community retains rising. But likelihood stays detached to scale, and lightning nonetheless strikes.
