Rare Bitcoin Win: Solo Miner Captures 3.125 BTC via Rented Hashrate

It is exceptionally rare for an individual miner to validate an entire Bitcoin block, but one miner recently achieved this feat, turning a modest, hobby-level operation into a significant payday. Using rented on-demand hashrate, the miner captured a full block reward, showing how small investments in cloud-based mining can occasionally pay off big.

Solo Miner Captures Full Block Reward

Braiins, a Bitcoin mining company, reported that a solo miner successfully mined block 938092, earning the standard reward of 3.125 BTC, worth roughly $200,000 at current market rates. The miner used on-demand hashrate for the operation, costing 119,000 satoshis—around $75—for 1 petahash per second, plus a 0.5% fee for solo mining services. The block was validated through CKPool and confirmed at approximately 8:04 a.m. UTC on Tuesday.

Kristian Csepcsar, Chief Marketing Officer at Braiins, pointed out how unlikely the win was, noting that renting 1 PH/s for a single day gave the miner roughly a 1 in 8,000 chance of mining a block—odds far lower than those of major lotteries, which are in the hundreds of millions. Despite the slim chances, opportunities add up over time because a new Bitcoin block is mined approximately every 10 minutes.

Trends in Solo Mining and Bitcoin Network Challenges

Bitcoin mining is typically dominated by large pools, which makes full-block wins by individual miners highly uncommon. Yet, the availability of cloud-based platforms has changed the game, allowing miners to rent computational power without needing self-owned devices. This opens the door for small-scale operators to compete and occasionally reap substantial rewards.

Despite these challenges, data from solo miner aggregator Bennet shows that miners are still managing to achieve notable results:

• In the past year, 21 miners successfully mined full blocks, earning a combined total of 66.16 BTC, currently valued at $4,329,065.
• This outcome represents a 17% increase in solo-mined blocks compared with the previous year, showing that small-scale mining continues to bring rewards.
• The blocks were mined at an average interval of 17.2 days, with the longest gap reaching 58 days, reflecting the unpredictable but ongoing nature of solo mining.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s mining difficulty has climbed to 144.4 trillion, recovering 15% after an 11% drop in network hashrate earlier this month due to harsh winter conditions in the United States. This represented one of the largest recent declines. According to CoinWarz, the next difficulty adjustment, expected on March 5, 2026, could increase the difficulty further to 145.12 trillion.