How solo Bitcoin miners hit 22 blocks hit in 12 months as another hit the jackpot this week
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 cut up amongst 1000’s of pool individuals. One deal with obtained the total payout in an trade dominated by industrial-scale mining operations commanding exahashes of compute energy.
But solo miners nonetheless handle to seek out blocks, not as a result of the odds are favorable, however as a result of likelihood would not care about expectations.
The math is brutal. Bitcoin’s community hashrate sits round 1,024 exahashes per second as of mid-January 2026, according to Hashrate Index. That’s roughly 1.024 billion terahashes competing to unravel every block.
A interest miner working a 6 TH/s ASIC faces roughly a 1-in-170-million probability per block try. The anticipated wait time to discover a single block at that hashrate exceeds 3,000 years.
Yet solo wins hold showing, with verified solo blocks hitting the chain each few weeks.
Mining is a Poisson course of (a statistics mannequin for random occasions taking place over time), a memoryless lottery the place every try is unbiased. The hashrate determines the likelihood per block, however likelihood would not implement clean distribution over brief timescales.
A miner working a 6 TH/s miner for a month has a 0.0025% probability of discovering at the least one block. That’s almost zero, but it surely’s not zero. Multiply that tiny likelihood throughout tens of 1000’s of solo miners globally, and somebody hits the jackpot recurrently.
Solo mining tracker information compiled by Bennet exhibits 22 verified solo blocks mined over the previous 12 months, with a mean interval of 15.6 days between wins.
How solo mining really works in 2026
Most solo wins come by means of solo mining providers like Solo CKPool, which gives Stratum work coordination so particular person miners can compete for full block rewards with out working the total stack themselves.
CKPool explicitly frames its service as “not a pool” in the financial sense, as there is not any reward splitting amongst individuals. Each miner’s hashrate competes independently for the full block reward.
If a miner linked to Solo CKPool finds a legitimate block, the coinbase transaction pays that miner’s deal with straight, minus a 2% service price. Currently, solely CKPool exhibits round 20,950 customers contributing roughly 188 petahashes of hashrate.
A more recent mannequin is run-your-own solo pool software program, exemplified by Public Pool in the Umbrel ecosystem. This open-source software lets miners run a solo mining pool utilizing their very own node, retaining the full 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 total block reward for a profitable discover, quite than a proportional share based mostly on contributed hashrate over time.
Either 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 whole hashrate.
For a 6 TH/s gadget, that is roughly one in 170 million per block.
Expected time to seek 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.
But anticipated time shouldn’t be the identical as likelihood over a set interval. A 6 TH/s miner has roughly a 0.0308% probability of discovering at the least one block over a full yr. Yet throughout 1000’s of miners working related setups, just a few will beat these odds.
This is why solo mining wins are likely to cluster round mid-range hashrate ranges. A miner working 2.3 petahashes, far beneath industrial scale however nicely above hobbyist {hardware}, has roughly an 11% probability of discovering a block inside a yr.
Over a big sufficient inhabitants of miners in that vary, wins turn out to be predictable in mixture even when any particular person miner stays unlikely to succeed.
Recent solo wins present the sample holding
Solo block discoveries have maintained a gentle 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 working 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 full reward.
FutureBit, which manufactures compact Bitcoin mining units designed for house use, has documented several solo wins from Apollo miners. These units sometimes run in the single-digit or low-double-digit terahash vary, being too small to generate significant pool rewards however nonetheless able to sometimes discovering blocks.
Bennet’s solo mining tracker, which aggregates verified solo blocks throughout CKPool, Public Pool, FutureBit units, and different recognized solo setups, exhibits 22 solo blocks discovered over the previous 12 months, up 29% year-over-year.
The common interval between solo wins throughout all tracked setups is 15.6 days, with the longest drought lasting 54 days. Total 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 earnings.
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 all of a sudden receives 3.125 BTC plus charges.
The anticipated worth is equivalent, each approaches converge to the identical long-term return per unit of hashrate, however the variance profile is completely completely different. Industrial miners have debt service, operational costs, and electricity contracts that require predictable income.
Variance is an unhedgeable threat.
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 probably 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 obstacles. Running 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 strive it, and the extra seen solo wins will turn out to be.
The block that simply hit
The Jan. 13 block represents the newest information level in a well-established sample.
A single deal with obtained the full 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. However, and not using a public declare from the miner or a verified pool tag in the coinbase, the precise setup stays ambiguous.
If the miner used Solo CKPool, the internet payout can be 98% of the whole after the service price. If it got here by means of Public Pool or correct solo infrastructure, the miner stored the full quantity.
Either manner, the win validates that solo mining continues to perform precisely as likelihood predicts: principally silent, sometimes spectacular.
The community will produce another 144 blocks as we speak. The overwhelming majority of rewards will circulate to industrial mining operations. But someplace in that stream of blocks, another solo miner will ultimately hit.
The odds have not improved. The problem hasn’t dropped. The community retains rising. Yet likelihood stays detached to scale, and lightning nonetheless strikes.
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