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 acquired the complete payout in an business dominated by industrial-scale mining operations commanding exahashes of compute energy.
However solo miners nonetheless handle to seek out blocks, not as a result of the percentages are favorable, however as a result of likelihood would not care about expectations.
The mathematics is brutal. Bitcoin’s community hashrate sits round 1,024 exahashes per second as of mid-January 2026, according to Hashrate Index. That is roughly 1.024 billion terahashes competing to resolve 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 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 easy distribution over quick timescales.
A miner operating a 6 TH/s miner for a month has a 0.0025% likelihood of discovering not less than one block. That is practically zero, however it’s not zero. Multiply that tiny likelihood throughout tens of 1000’s of solo miners globally, and somebody hits the jackpot often.
Solo mining tracker knowledge compiled by Bennet exhibits 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 via solo mining providers like Solo CKPool, which offers 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 is no reward splitting amongst individuals. Every miner’s hashrate competes independently for the total 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. Presently, solely CKPool exhibits 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 total 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, moderately than a proportional share primarily based on contributed hashrate over time.
Both the miner wins all the pieces 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.
Anticipated 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 count on 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 shouldn’t be the identical as likelihood over a hard and fast interval. A 6 TH/s miner has roughly a 0.0308% likelihood of discovering not less than one block over a full yr. But throughout 1000’s of miners operating comparable setups, a number of will beat these odds.
For this reason solo mining wins are likely to cluster round mid-range hashrate ranges. A miner operating 2.3 petahashes, far beneath industrial scale however properly 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 grow to be predictable in combination even when any particular person miner stays unlikely to succeed.
Latest 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 via CKPool infrastructure.
One dramatic instance occurred on Nov. 23, 2025, when a miner operating simply 6 TH/s, going through odds of about 1 in 170 million per block, efficiently discovered a block via CKPool and claimed the total reward.
FutureBit, which manufactures compact Bitcoin mining gadgets designed for house use, has documented several 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 recognized solo setups, exhibits 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 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 constantly.
A solo miner with 200 TH/s receives nothing for years, then abruptly receives 3.125 BTC plus charges.
The anticipated worth is similar, 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 costs, and electricity 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 moderately 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 guess.
Infrastructure enhancements have additionally lowered technical obstacles. Working 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 grow to be.
The block that simply hit
The Jan. 13 block represents the newest knowledge level in a well-established sample.
A single deal with acquired the total block reward price near $300,000 at Bitcoin’s worth of round $94,000. The payout construction suggests the win got here via solo mining infrastructure. Nevertheless, 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 whole after the service price. If it got here via Public Pool or correct solo infrastructure, the miner stored the total quantity.
Both manner, the win validates that solo mining continues to operate precisely as likelihood predicts: principally silent, often spectacular.
The community will produce one other 144 blocks in the present day. The overwhelming majority of rewards will circulation to industrial mining operations. However someplace in that stream of blocks, one other solo miner will ultimately hit.
The percentages have not improved. The problem hasn’t dropped. The community retains rising. But likelihood stays detached to scale, and lightning nonetheless strikes.
