With only $75 in leased mining power, a solo Bitcoin miner secures a $200,000 block reward.

A solo miner has beaten steep odds to secure a full Bitcoin block reward worth more than $200,000 after spending just $75 on rented hashpower.

Blockchain data from Mempool.space shows the miner validated block 938,092 at approximately 8:04 a.m. UTC on Tuesday, claiming the entire 3.125 BTC subsidy. To compete, the individual leased 1 petahash per second (PH/s) of computing power through an on-demand cloud mining service, paying roughly 119,000 satoshis — about $75 — for the attempt.

The miner used CKPool, a service that enables participants to mine independently while relying on a shared server to submit completed blocks to the Bitcoin network. Unlike conventional mining pools that divide rewards among contributors, solo miners retain the full payout if they successfully solve a block.

The payoff amounts to roughly a 2,600-fold return on capital — an outcome that underscores the highly asymmetric nature of small-scale solo mining. While the probabilities are transparent, they are overwhelmingly stacked against operators with minimal hashrate.

Bitcoin produces a new block roughly every 10 minutes. Miners compete to solve a cryptographic puzzle, and the first to find a valid solution earns the block reward and transaction fees. The likelihood of success is directly tied to hashrate — the computational power deployed to generate guesses. Greater hashrate translates into more attempts per second and improved odds.

With only 1 PH/s, the solo miner represented a tiny fraction of the global network’s total computing power, which is dominated by industrial-scale mining operations. Statistically, the chance of such a small allocation finding a block before major mining farms is extremely low.

Even so, independent wins continue to surface. According to data from solo mining tracker Bennet, 21 individual miners have validated blocks on their own over the past year, collectively earning 66 BTC, valued at approximately $4.1 million at current prices. That reflects a 17% increase in solo-mined blocks year over year, with one occurring on average every 17 days.

The growing availability of cloud-based hashrate rentals has lowered barriers to entry. Participants no longer need to purchase and operate physical mining hardware to try their luck; instead, they can lease computing power for relatively modest sums, transforming solo mining into a high-risk, high-reward probability trade.

The win also came during a volatile period for mining economics. Bitcoin’s network difficulty recently climbed 15% to 144.4 trillion, reversing an 11% drop earlier in the month that followed severe winter storms in the United States. Those disruptions temporarily reduced overall hashrate, briefly making blocks easier to mine before the network recalibrated.

At today’s difficulty, miners must perform an average of 144.4 trillion hash attempts to discover a valid block — a far cry from the network’s early days in 2009, when competition was minimal.

For one solo participant, however, a $75 allocation of rented hashpower — combined with timing and probability — was enough to capture a six-figure reward.

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