On April 5, a solo miner with a hash rate of 7 PH/s added block #837,814 to the blockchain of the first cryptocurrency. This was reported by CKPool administrator Con Kolivas.
This miner has been mining intermittently since the last pool restart and had accumulated about 1/20th of the shares required to solve a block on average. It is not clear they were definitely renting hashrate, but had a lot of hashrate nonetheless.
— Dr -ck (@ckpooldev) April 5, 2024
“This miner has been mining intermittently since the last pool restart and on average accumulated about 1/20th of the shares needed to solve a block,” wrote Kolivas.
According to BTC.com, the user received a reward of 6.25 BTC (approximately $422,750 at the time of writing) and a fee of 0.01 BTC.
Data from Glassnode indicates that the network’s computational power on April 4 was 598.1 EH/s (smoothed by a seven-day moving average).
“The user contacted me personally. He was mining on his own equipment, occasionally renting additional capacity,” added Kolivas.
Previously, the CKPool administrator has frequently reported similar cases. For instance, in October 2023, a solo miner added a block to the Bitcoin network with equipment power of 11 PH/s, and in May, another fortunate miner earned $177,115 by mining a block.
At the end of March 2024, the difficulty of mining the first cryptocurrency decreased by 0.97%. The indicator stood at 83.13 T.