Lucky Solo Bitcoin Miner Walks Away with $266K
Small home setup beats industrial Bitcoin miners to 3.146 BTC jackpot as big players pivot into AI
A solo Bitcoin miner using what appears to be hobby-level hardware has earned a $266,000 payday after solving block 924,569, securing the full 3.146 BTC reward against enormous odds.
The miner was hashing at 1.2 terahashes per second (TH/s), computing power that is insignificant compared with today’s industrial Bitcoin mining farms, which operate at exahash scale. Despite this, the miner’s lucky share won the race to find the next block.
CKpool administrator Con Kolivas shared the result on X, calling the miner “extremely lucky” and estimating the probability of such a win at roughly 1.2 million to one per day at that hash rate. Onchain data shows the miner received 3.125 BTC from the block subsidy and 0.021 BTC in transaction fees, bringing the total to just over 3.146 BTC.
The win adds to a strong year for solo miners. Data from Mempool Space shows that 13 solo-mined blocks have been discovered via CKpool in 2025, averaging over one per month despite the dominance of large-scale operators. In a similar case last month, a solo miner earned $347,455 for solving block 920,440 entirely on their own.
Other solo victories were recorded earlier this year, including a miner with 2.3 petahashes of hash rate capturing a full block reward, alongside wins in June, March and February.
At the same time, major mining companies are racing to diversify. CleanSpark has started building out AI-focused data center infrastructure, a strategy that helped lift its share price after it was revealed in October, while TeraWulf plans to raise $500 million via convertible notes to fund a new AI-ready data center campus in Abernathy, Texas.
