Solo Miner Strikes Bitcoin Block, Earns $371,000

On August 17, a solo miner independently mined block #910,440 on the Bitcoin network, earning 3.137 BTC (~$371,576) in rewards and fees. This was reported by CK Pool administrator Con Kolivas.

Congratulations to miner bc1q~nwsgdw0wfh4trqal69fz with 9PH for solving the 305th solo block at https://t.co/UWgBvLk5AE! A miner of this size has about a 1 in 800 chance of solving a block per day.https://t.co/6WKLc4IshW pic.twitter.com/Z0OSzvBCFs

— Dr -ck (@ckpooldev) August 17, 2025

According to him, the miner was using equipment with a hash rate of 9 TH/s. The probability of such an event is approximately 1 in 800 per day.

The block contained 4,900 transactions, about 3,300 of which had a fee of less than a satoshi per virtual byte (sat/vB). The additional income from these operations amounted to only 0.0018 BTC (~$220) — 0.06% of the block reward.

Each such transaction created new UTXO, increasing the network load without significant benefit to the miner.

Kolivas noted that including low-fee transactions was an experiment. Network participants like F2Pool have already started processing them, and abandoning this practice put solo miners at a disadvantage in mining new blocks.

The creator of CK Pool concluded that the potential damage from the mass creation of new UTXOs outweighs the “insignificant financial benefit.” The pool will now only monitor such transactions but not include them in blocks.

“For transactions with such low fees to become somewhat significant for mining pools, the block reward would have to decrease to extremely low levels. I would only consider them if they increased income by at least 1%. However, this would require the total block reward to fall below 0.2 BTC — a level we are unlikely to reach in the coming decades,” the expert emphasized.

Kolivas urged other pools to reconsider their policies, as such transactions could negatively impact the fee structure in the long term.

Community Reaction

Users thanked the creator of CK Pool for the analysis. Fedora project founder Warren Togami called UTXO expansion “a negative factor that most have ignored for years.”

UTXO expansion is a negative externality that most people have ignored all these years. Mining UTXO expansion at a too-low fee privatizes gain while socializing the cost to everyone else.

Thank you for taking the time to analyze and to raise awareness of the issue.

— Warren Togami (@wtogami) August 18, 2025

“Mining blocks that increase UTXO at too low a fee privatizes profit while passing costs onto everyone else,” he wrote.

On July 27, another solo miner managed to earn $372,773 by mining block #907,283.

On August 15, the company GoMining predicted a new hype around Bitcoin mining.