Bitcoin is the world's first cryptocurrency, created by a someone or group of people under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. It is still unclear who this person or group really is. The Bitcoin blockchain is based on the Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism (PoW). The essence of this mechanism is that participants in the system use their computing resources to confirm transactions, verify data, and most importantly, create new blocks. Miners receive a reward (currently 6.25 BTC) for creating a new block.
Ethereum completely refused the PoW consensus mechanism last fall by updating the network with The Merge.
Hundreds of thousands of miners compete for the benefits of Bitcoin mining. To maximize efficiency, miners are organized into pools, which are groups of miners that combine their computing power to increase their chances of receiving a reward for producing a new block. As of the time of writing, the largest pool, according to BTC.com, is Foundry USA, which accounts for more than 31% of the total Bitcoin mining hashrate (computing power).
However, as our current story demonstrates, it is not necessary to possess the largest amount of computing power to receive the coveted 6.25 BTC reward. On March 10th, a solo miner with a computing power of 6.7 PH/s (petahashes per second) successfully produced a new block and received the reward. On that day, the entire network's hashrate, according to BitInfoCharts, was 285.6225 EH/s (exahashes per second). If we convert this number to petahashes per second, it would be equivalent to 285,622.5 PH/s. Therefore, the hashrate of the solo miner amounted to about 0.002% of the total network hashrate.
The miner used the Solo CK pool service, which facilitates solo mining. If a miner successfully mines a block, 2% of the reward is sent to the service wallet as payment for the pool's work. Dr. Con Kolivas, the administrator of Solo CK pool, congratulated the hero of our article on producing a block successfully. He was surprised by the miner's luck, as he had only started using the service for about two days before receiving the reward.
A miner of this size will solve a block on average about once every 10 months, but they've only been mining solo for the last 2 days so has been very lucky. There is no way of knowing how many times they've intermittently pointed hashrate at solo ckpool before though.
— Dr. Con Kolivas (@ckpooldev) March 10, 2023
Afterward, the miner himself appeared on the forum bitcointalk.org to share his story with other users. He mentioned that he typically mines using his own equipment, which has a total power of 270 TH/s (terahash/second). However, on March 9th, he decided to utilize the Nicehash service to enhance his computing power. The very next day, the miner successfully generated a block and received a reward.
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