A single Bitcoin (BTC) miner collected a full block reward on Jan. 13, claiming 3.125 BTC plus fees worth close to $300,000 at current prices.
The win wasn’t split among thousands of pool participants. One address received the entire payout in an industry dominated by industrial-scale mining operations commanding exahashes of compute power.
But solo miners still manage to find blocks, not because the odds are favorable, but because probability doesn’t care about expectations.
The math is brutal. Bitcoin’s network hashrate sits around 1,024 exahashes per second as of mid-January 2026, according to Hashrate Index. That’s roughly 1.024 billion terahashes competing to solve each block.
A hobby miner running a 6 TH/s ASIC faces roughly a 1-in-170-million chance per block attempt. The expected wait time to find a single block at that hashrate exceeds 3,000 years.
Yet solo wins keep appearing, with verified solo blocks hitting the chain every few weeks.
Mining is a Poisson process (a statistics model for random events happening over time), a memoryless lottery where each attempt is independent. The hashrate determines the probability per block, but probability doesn’t enforce smooth distribution over short timescales.
A miner running a 6 TH/s miner for a month has a 0.0025% chance of finding at least one block. That’s nearly zero, but it’s not zero. Multiply that tiny probability across tens of thousands of solo miners globally, and someone hits the jackpot regularly.
Solo mining tracker data compiled by Bennet shows 22 verified solo blocks mined over the past 12 months, with an average interval of 15.6 days between wins.
How solo mining actually works in 2026
Most solo wins come through solo mining services like Solo CKPool, which provides Stratum work coordination so individual miners can compete for full block rewards without running the entire stack themselves.
CKPool explicitly frames its service as “not a pool” in the economic sense, as there’s no reward splitting among participants. Each miner’s hashrate competes independently for the full block reward.
If a miner connected to Solo CKPool finds a valid block, the coinbase transaction pays that miner’s address directly, minus a 2% service fee. Currently, only CKPool shows around 20,950 users contributing approximately 188 petahashes of hashrate.
A newer model is run-your-own solo pool software, exemplified by Public Pool in the Umbrel ecosystem. This open-source application lets miners run a solo mining pool using their own node, retaining the full reward if they hit a block. It removes the service fee but requires more technical setup.
What all models share is that the miner receives the entire block reward for a successful find, rather than a proportional share based on contributed hashrate over time.
Either the miner wins everything or wins nothing.
Odds are worse than expected, but better than never
At Bitcoin’s current network hashrate of approximately 1,024 EH/s, a miner’s probability of finding any given block equals their hashrate divided by the network’s total hashrate.
For a 6 TH/s device, that’s roughly one in 170 million per block.
Expected time to find one block scales inversely with that probability. Since Bitcoin produces a block roughly every 10 minutes, a 6 TH/s miner would expect to wait around 3,247 years to find a single block.
A more powerful 200 TH/s ASIC would still take around 97 years to reach 1 TH/s. Even at 1 petahash, the expected wait drops to 19.5 years.
But expected time is not the same as probability over a fixed period. A 6 TH/s miner has roughly a 0.0308% chance of finding at least one block over a full year. Yet across thousands of miners running similar setups, a few will beat those odds.
This is why solo mining wins tend to cluster around mid-range hashrate levels. A miner running 2.3 petahashes, far below industrial scale but well above hobbyist hardware, has roughly an 11% chance of finding a block within a year.
Over a large enough population of miners in that range, wins become predictable in aggregate even if any individual miner remains unlikely to succeed.
Recent solo wins show the pattern holding
Solo block discoveries have maintained a steady cadence over the past year. Block 920,440, mined on Oct. 23, 2025, was awarded to a Public Pool miner, who collected 3.125 BTC plus approximately 0.016 BTC in fees.
Block 924,569 on Nov. 21, 2025, delivered roughly 3.146 BTC to a solo miner operating through CKPool infrastructure.
One dramatic example occurred on Nov. 23, 2025, when a miner running just 6 TH/s, facing odds of about 1 in 170 million per block, successfully found a block through CKPool and claimed the full reward.
FutureBit, which manufactures compact Bitcoin mining devices designed for home use, has documented several solo wins from Apollo miners. These devices typically run in the single-digit or low-double-digit terahash range, being too small to generate meaningful pool rewards but still capable of occasionally finding blocks.
Bennet’s solo mining tracker, which aggregates verified solo blocks across CKPool, Public Pool, FutureBit devices, and other known solo setups, shows 22 solo blocks found over the past 12 months, up 29% year-over-year.
The average interval between solo wins across all tracked setups is 15.6 days, with the longest drought lasting 54 days. Total rewards distributed to solo miners over that period sum to approximately 69.35 BTC.
Why solo mining exists at all
The economic case for solo mining is weak if optimized for steady income.
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 continuously.
A solo miner with 200 TH/s receives nothing for years, then suddenly receives 3.125 BTC plus fees.
The expected value is identical, both approaches converge to the same long-term return per unit of hashrate, but the variance profile is entirely different. Industrial miners have debt service, operational costs, and electricity contracts that require predictable revenue.
Variance is an unhedgeable risk.
Solo mining persists because a subset of miners values the variance itself. Some run mining hardware as a hobby or ideological commitment rather than a profit-maximizing business.
The psychological appeal of potentially winning a full block outweighs the near-certainty of earning nothing. Others treat solo mining as a lottery ticket, economically irrational on an expected-value basis, but defensible as entertainment or a tail-risk bet.
Infrastructure improvements have also lowered technical barriers. Running a solo mining operation in 2015 required operating a full Bitcoin node, configuring Stratum software, and managing network connectivity.
CKPool and Public Pool reduce that setup to pointing mining hardware at a URL or installing a plug-and-play app. The easier it becomes to solo mine, the more miners will try it, and the more visible solo wins will become.
The block that just hit
The Jan. 13 block represents the latest data point in a well-established pattern.
A single address received the full block reward worth close to $300,000 at Bitcoin’s price of around $94,000. The payout structure suggests the win came through solo mining infrastructure. However, without a public claim from the miner or a verified pool tag in the coinbase, the exact setup remains ambiguous.
If the miner used Solo CKPool, the net payout would be 98% of the total after the service fee. If it came through Public Pool or proper solo infrastructure, the miner kept the full amount.
Either way, the win validates that solo mining continues to function exactly as probability predicts: mostly silent, occasionally spectacular.
The network will produce another 144 blocks today. The overwhelming majority of rewards will flow to industrial mining operations. But somewhere in that stream of blocks, another solo miner will eventually hit.
The odds haven’t improved. The difficulty hasn’t dropped. The network keeps growing. Yet probability remains indifferent to scale, and lightning still strikes.
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