 
 
Ding ding ding — we have two winners!
Two solo miners independently processed full blocks and pocketed sweet payouts of around $300,000 each, outgunning the top mining operations that typically mine blocks on the top cryptocurrency’s network in incredible odds.
Two Lucky Solo Miners Win $300K Bitcoin Lottery
On Thursday, one miner solved block 932373 of the Bitcoin blockchain, bagging a 3.157 BTC reward— valued at roughly $304,650 at current prices. Bitcoin is trading at approximately $95,221, down a paltry 0.3% in the last 24 hours, but up 5.2% on a weekly basis, according to CoinGecko.
This was preceded by another independent miner successfully striking gold earlier this week by solving a valid block and banking a payout worth around $295,000, according to Mempool Space.
These solo miners work independently rather than contributing hashpower to a pool, receiving the full payout— an increasingly improbable feat given the dominance of large, industrial-scale mining operations over the last decade.
 
Miners currently receive 3.125 BTC plus transaction fees for adding a block to the Bitcoin network. As part of the proof-of-work consensus mechanism in the apex crypto, payouts are issued in newly minted Bitcoin.
It’s worth noting that a solo miner is a mining operation using an independent pool that isn’t a notable brand or publicly traded company dominating the Bitcoin mining industry, such as Foundry USA, AntPool, or F2Pool.
In the old days, people could mine the crypto at home using their computers all day long. But as the network has grown and difficulty has increased, miners now typically consist of companies using massive amounts of computational resources to mine the world’s largest cryptocurrency.
Mining has become increasingly difficult as hashrate climbs with each halving cycle, tightening margins and lowering profitability, while forcing miners to diversify revenue streams into industries such as artificial intelligence and high-performance computing to cover operational costs.