Solo Bitcoin Miner Nabs $200K After Renting $75 Worth of Hash Power
A Bitcoin miner spent $75 to rent 1 petahash per second of mining power from Braiins’ marketplace and unexpectedly discovered a solo block, earning over 3.1 BTC (roughly $200,000). This outcome is extremely rare—such an event is estimated to occur once every 1.1 million blocks at that level of hash power, equivalent to about 21 years of mining. Solo mining is uncommon, as most Bitcoin blocks are found by large mining pools with substantial hardware resources. Nonetheless, isolated solo mining wins have recently occurred, with similar jackpots reported in December and January. The event highlights both the increasing dominance of large miners and the ongoing rise in the Bitcoin network’s computational power, which stands at over 1.1 zettahashes per second—up 61% from the previous year. Some of this shifting power is attributed to miners reallocating resources to AI computation, leading to a decline in North American mining pool share and prompting operational changes among major mining companies.
