A solo Bitcoin miner has become the latest lucky person to win the “Bitcoin mining lottery,” pocketing a $347,455 block reward.
Bitcoin node infrastructure company Umbrel said the solo miner won the block via the Public Pool Bitcoin mining pool — earning the 3.125 Bitcoin (BTC) block reward and a 0.016 BTC transaction fee on top.
It took place at block height 920,440, on Thursday at 7:32 pm UTC, Mempool.space data shows.
While solo Bitcoin miners winning blocks isn’t uncommon, this one was more impressive as the miner secured the block entirely on their own by running a solo mining pool as opposed to the more common practice of pooling hash power with others.
“No middlemen. No third-parties. Just pure self-sovereignty in action,” Umbrel said, while the Bitcoin Bazaar X account added:
“A solo block has been mined by a solominer, mining on his own mining pool, hosted on an Umbrel Server. Total sovereignty. We need more of this.”
Solo Bitcoin mining is a win for decentralization
The increase in solo Bitcoin miners solving blocks is a good thing for Bitcoin’s decentralization as it gives smaller miners a better chance to compete against the large industrial-scale miners, many of which are publicly traded.
Pocket-sized Bitcoin miners are still cheaper than iPhones
It comes amid a rise in smaller-sized Bitcoin miners, such as Bitaxes in recent years, which sell from $155 to over $600, depending on the machine’s terahash-per-second capacity.
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While the pocket-sized machines combined only contribute a small boost to Bitcoin’s hash rate, many of these machines have been open-sourced to fight the “secrecy and exclusivity” of larger Bitcoin miners, which typically use the closed-sourced Bitcoin ASICs, a BitMaker spokesperson told Cointelegraph in 2023.
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