A solo Bitcoin miner beat astronomically long odds early Monday, mining block 960,804 and collecting a reward worth roughly $200,000. The block, found at 02:11 UTC on August 3, 2026, carried a payout of 3.15689830 BTC — the standard 3.125 BTC subsidy plus 0.032 BTC in transaction fees from the 4,243 transactions packed into the block.
The win was processed through CKPool, the solo-mining pool run pseudonymously by a developer known as Dr -ck. It marks the 317th solo block found through the service since it began tracking such wins. CKPool takes a 2% cut of any block a participant finds, with the remainder sent directly to the miner's address.
A statistically improbable win
Dr -ck estimated the winning miner's hashrate at a peak of 100 PH per second, though he described the figure as "wildly variable" and said it was probably rented rather than owned outright. Against Bitcoin's total network hashrate of roughly 924 exahashes per second at the time, that represented a sliver of the network — somewhere around 0.011% of global mining power.
At that hashrate, the miner's statistical odds of finding a block worked out to roughly once every 64 days, a return that arrived far faster than chance would typically allow for a participant of that size. For comparison, a hobbyist running a single 100 TH/s machine faces odds closer to 1 in 62,750 on any given day, implying an average wait of about 172 years between wins.
Part of a recurring pattern
Solo jackpots like this one have become a semi-regular feature of CKPool's leaderboard. In April, a miner running roughly 70 TH/s collected a $225,000 reward. Earlier wins on the platform returned $266,000, $365,000 and $350,000 to their respective finders. Every one of these payouts has been fixed at the current 3.125 BTC subsidy, which will not change until Bitcoin's next halving.
That halving is expected to arrive at block 1,050,000, roughly 89,000 blocks away, with most estimates pointing to spring 2028. At that point the subsidy will drop to 1.5625 BTC, cutting the size of future solo jackpots roughly in half in BTC terms.
A win amid turmoil
Dr -ck noted that the block arrived "despite the chaos" surrounding a recent exploit targeting Coldcard hardware wallets, an incident with estimated losses of $114 million. Bitcoin itself traded around $63,700 at the time of the block, up about 1.1% on the day.
Solo mining remains a long-shot pursuit for all but the largest hobbyist operations, but each high-profile win tends to renew interest in pools like CKPool that let smaller miners compete for a full block reward rather than splitting proceeds across a traditional mining pool.
