• A solo Bitcoin miner earned the 6.25 BTC block reward after beating the odds to solve block 793607.
• The miner reportedly used an Antminer S9 with about 17 TH.
• At today’s Bitcoin mining difficulty and with 17 TH, a solo miner would need an average of 450 years to land a block.

With Bitcoin price struggling below $26,000, and the wider crypto market impacted by recent regulatory events, there’s has been very little to cheer Bitcoiners.

But for a solo BTC miner, a lucky break had them strike gold with the winning of a block reward. According to on-chain data, the miner beat staggering odds to mine block 793607 and earn the 6.25 BTC block reward.

BTC miner with single Antminer S9 hits jackpot

The solo miner reportedly achieved the once-in-a-life-time feat using a single Antminer S9 and accounted for only 17 terahashes (TH). Their “lottery” win was worth about $160,000 at the time of block reward.

“Congratulations to miner 151XTfHBfaDqoNWGGeYobNX2YzFFWuB5YD with only ~17TH for solving the 275th block at http://solo.ckpool.org! That is likely a single S9 miner. A miner of this size would only solve a block once every ~450 years on average,” tweeted Con Kolivas, a CGMiner software engineer and the admin of Solo CKPool.  

It’s not the first time a solo miner has hit such a jackpot, with CKPool apparently seeing seven such instances since January. However, the feat is increasingly difficult as the Bitcoin hashrate and mining difficulty have increased.

According to data from Blockchain.com, the current Bitcoin mining difficulty is 51.23 trillion hashes. Mining difficulty looks at how difficult it is to mine the next block, that is how many hashes a miner must generate to find and solve a valid block. The current difficulty is at all-time highs and has most blocks solved by major mining pools and companies.

The difficulty adjusts every 2016 blocks (about two weeks’ time) and can go up or down. The next adjustment expected on June 14 will see the difficulty jump by about 2.92% to 52.73 T.