Solo Miner Earns $371,000

⚡️ A solo miner mined a Bitcoin block and earned $371,000 just yesterday.

In the network of the “first cryptocurrency,” a lone miner independently mined block #910,440, receiving 3.137 BTC (~$371,576) as rewards and fees. This was reported by CK Pool administrator Con Colivas.

The miner operated equipment with a hash rate of 9 TH/s. Experts estimate the probability of this happening at roughly 1 in 800 per day — a rare and noteworthy event.

The block contained 4,900 transactions, about 3,300 of which had very low fees — less than one satoshi per virtual byte (sat/vB). Additional income from these transactions was only 0.0018 BTC (~$220), representing just 0.06% of the block reward. Each such transaction creates new UTXOs, increasing network load without meaningful benefit to the miner.

Colivas noted that including these transactions was experimental. Network participants, such as F2Pool, have already begun processing them, and avoiding this practice placed solo miners at a disadvantage when mining new blocks.

However, the CK Pool founder concluded that the potential damage from mass creation of new UTXOs outweighs the “insignificant financial benefit.” The pool will now only track such transactions, without including them in blocks.

“For transactions with such low fees to become even slightly meaningful to mining pools, the block reward would have to drop to extremely low levels. I would consider them only if they increased revenue by at least 1%. To achieve this, the total block reward would need to fall below 0.2 BTC — levels we are unlikely to reach in the next decades,” Colivas emphasized.

Community Reaction

Users thanked the CK Pool founder for the detailed analysis. Fedora project founder Warren Togami noted that the growth of UTXOs is a “negative factor that most have ignored for years.”

According to him, including blocks with very low-fee transactions “privatizes profit, shifting costs onto other network participants.”

This event highlights not only the rarity of successfully mining blocks solo but also the importance of optimal transaction inclusion policies to maintain Bitcoin network stability.