Bitcoin News: Solo Bitcoin Miner Scores $330K Block Reward Despite Record-High Difficulty

Key Takeaways:Block 899,826 was mined solo for $330,386 in BTC rewards.The winning miner’s hashrate spiked to 259 PH/s, likely rented.Bitcoin mining difficulty hit a record 126.98T on June 1.Solo mining wins are increasingly rare but not impossible.Solo Bitcoin Miner Defies 126T Difficulty to Claim $330K Reward for Single BlockIn an extraordinary stroke of luck — or calculated strategy — a solo Bitcoin miner has earned a $330,386 reward for successfully mining block 899,826, despite Bitcoin’s mining difficulty reaching a historic peak of 126.98 trillion.The block, confirmed at 3:48 am UTC on June 5, contained 3,680 transactions, according to Mempool.space. The miner earned 3.125 BTC as the base reward plus an additional 0.026 BTC in transaction fees, averaging $0.29 per transaction — a sign of low congestion at the time.Rented Hashrate May Have Boosted ChancesSoftware engineer Con Kolivas, administrator of the Solo CKPool, said on X (formerly Twitter) that the winning miner recently spiked their hashrate to a massive 259 PH/s — far above the miner’s usual activity levels.Kolivas suspects the miner rented the hashrate from a cloud mining provider or a hash marketplace, temporarily redirecting it to CKPool to “take a shot” at winning a block solo.“Only one worker was connected, indicating this was almost certainly a rented hashrate,” Kolivas posted.This strategy — although risky — paid off handsomely in this case.Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Hits All-Time HighThe win comes just days after Bitcoin mining difficulty hit a record 126.98 trillion on June 1, per Blockchain.com. This adjustment reflects growing competition in the mining ecosystem and increasing security across the Bitcoin network.Bitcoin’s mining difficulty automatically adjusts every 2,016 blocks, based on the network’s total hashrate — a measure of global computational power.At current difficulty levels, solo mining success is extremely rare, making this win a statistical outlier — and all the more newsworthy.More Solo Miner Wins in 2025Despite the odds, solo block wins have been making headlines in 2025. On March 10, a miner using a low-power setup earned 3.15 BTC (then worth $263,000) for mining block 887,212. Another solo miner pulled off a similar feat on February 10, solving block 883,181 for over $300,000 in rewards.Each of these solo successes was made possible via Solo CKPool, a platform that allows individual miners to pool efforts without joining large mining farms.