A solo Bitcoin miner has hit the “Bitcoin mining lottery,” earning a $347,455 block reward.
According to Bitcoin node infrastructure company Umbrel, the miner won the block through the Public Pool Bitcoin mining pool, collecting the 3.125 BTC block reward plus a 0.016 BTC transaction fee.
The win occurred at block height 920,440 on Thursday at 7:32 pm UTC, according to Mempool.space data.
While solo miners claiming blocks isn’t unheard of, this achievement is notable because the miner secured the reward entirely on their own, running a solo mining pool rather than joining forces with other miners.
“No middlemen. No third parties. Just pure self-sovereignty in action,” Umbrel said, with the Bitcoin Bazaar X account echoing the sentiment.
“A solo block has been mined by a solominer, mining on his own mining pool, hosted on an Umbrel Server. Total sovereignty. We need more of this.”
Solo Bitcoin mining supports decentralization
The rise of solo Bitcoin miners solving blocks is a positive sign for Bitcoin’s decentralization, giving smaller miners a better chance to compete with large, industrial-scale operations, many of which are publicly traded.
Pocket-sized Bitcoin miners remain affordable
This trend coincides with the growth of smaller, more accessible Bitcoin mining machines, such as Bitaxes, which range from $155 to over $600 depending on their terahash-per-second capacity.
While these pocket-sized miners contribute only modestly to Bitcoin’s overall hash rate, many have been open-sourced to challenge the “secrecy and exclusivity” of larger mining operations, which typically rely on closed-source Bitcoin ASICs, a BitMaker spokesperson noted in 2023.
