The Other One Bitcoin miner The odds are against you The reward was 3.125 BTC for processing a Block last week. At the time—including the transaction fees—that was a $259,637 payday. This was a solo score that has been repeated several times in recent months.
Did the miner get lucky? Is solo mining becoming more common? Can an ordinary Joe set up a mining machine for hobby purposes and still succeed with relatively low resources in comparison to publically traded miner?
Answers vary. Solo miners, a Term used to describe everything from individual hobby miners to groups that prefer to operate privately and discreetly, are succeeding more often, although not dramatically so—and the totals are unlikely to spike significantly.
SOLO BLOCK FIND! pic.twitter.com/R0rRHW2wrb
— Solosatoshi.com™⚡️ (@SoloSatoshi) March 29, 2025
Mining without the support of a big pool is "still like playing the lottery," said Scott Norris, CEO of independent Bitcoin miner Optiminer.
In 2022, solo miners using the Solo CKPool—a service allowing anonymous miners to get started with a mining hook-up, without the need to run their own full Bitcoin node—solved seven blocks. By 2023 the number had risen to 12. In 2024 the number reached 16 blocks.
However, a block produced by Solo CKPool does not. You can also check out our other blog posts. It does not necessarily mean that someone is alone, in their bedroom, mining Bitcoin at a low hashrate. This claim has been made by some Crypto Twitter users loudly but incorrectly.
The mining pool industry is dominated by a handful of big players—think Foundry, AntPool, and F2Pool. Mining pools are a way for miners to share resources with each other and receive rewards. With a service like Solo CKPool, the miner will get the reward once they find a block—and keep nearly all of it.
The Bitcoin network is growing, so mining operations are increasingly industrialized and run by large public companies. Bitcoiners on the hard-core side of the spectrum argue that mining blocks is bad because Bitcoin should be decentralized.
Now, hobby mining rigs such as Bitaxe or FutureBit Apollo that sell for $200-500 are popular with many. "Bitcoin maximalists." FutureBit Apollo in January Process a block—but only thanks to a nonprofit group donating hash rate (the computational power committed to supporting the Bitcoin network) to the machine from other machines.
The idea was to "dismantle the proprietary mining empire to make Bitcoin and freedom tech accessible to anyone," pseudonymous Bitcoin miner Econoalchemist wrote on X at the time.
If you want to support our mission to dismantle the proprietary mining empire to make Bitcoin & freedom tech accessible to anyone, then point your miners to:
stratum+tcp://donate.256foundation.org:3333
Set the name of the worker to:
bc1qce93hy5rhg02s6aeu7mfdvxg76x66pqqtrvzs3— burn the bridge (@econoalchemist) January 28, 2025
The apparent increase in individual block winnings could have been due to the hobby mining boom, even with low odds. According to an interview conducted with DecryptEconoalchemist noticed the growing trend in recent solo successes.
"Every once in a while, and more and more frequently, that single machine [processing a block] is a Bitaxe or similar small mining device found running quietly in someone's home," he said.
Optimer's Scott Norris noted that conglomerates could be processing blocks by not using a big pool, but by having a lot of hashrate.
Solo Satoshi in Houston, Texas, sells mining machines like the Bitaxe Gamma. It states on its site that a Bitaxe machine costing $180 with a hashrate 1.2 Terahash/second would give a chance of 0.00068390% per day to mine a block.
But Matt Howard, who founded Solo Satoshi, said that getting stuck into solo mining isn't necessarily about the payday.
"The primary goal is more decentralization. Finding a block and getting the Bitcoin reward is a bonus," he said. "To the Bitcoin maximalists, they understand that mining needs to be decentralized."
Edited By James Rubin
