Solo Bitcoin Miners Are Winning More Blocks Lately—What Gives? – Decrypt

Another solo Bitcoin miner defied the odds last week, processing a block and bagging a 3.125 BTC reward. At the time—including the transaction fees—that was a $259,637 payday. And it was one of several such solo scores in recent months.

Was the miner lucky? Is solo mining becoming more common? And can an average Joe hook up a hobby mining machine and succeed with minimal resources compared to publicly traded miners?

The answers vary. Solo miners, a term used to describe everything from individual hobby miners to groups that prefer to operate privately and discreetly, are succeeding more often, although not dramatically so—and the totals are unlikely to spike significantly.

Mining without the support of a big pool is “still like playing the lottery,” said Scott Norris, CEO of independent Bitcoin miner Optiminer.

In 2022, solo miners using the Solo CKPool—a service allowing anonymous miners to get started with a mining hook-up, without the need to run their own full Bitcoin node—solved seven blocks. In 2023, the number jumped to 12 blocks. Fast forward to 2024, and the number hit 16 blocks. 

But a block mined using Solo CKPool (which is not a traditional mining pool, despite the name) does not necessarily mean someone is mining Bitcoin with very little hash rate, alone in their bedroom. Some Crypto Twitter observers have loudly, but erroneously made this claim. 

The mining pool industry is dominated by a handful of big players—think Foundry, AntPool, and F2Pool. Miners hook up to the pool, share resources, and split rewards. With a service like Solo CKPool, the miner will get the reward once they find a block—and keep nearly all of it.

As the Bitcoin network has grown, more power and resources are needed to mine blocks, and mining businesses often are industrial operations run by public companies. Some hardcore Bitcoiners argue that this is bad for Bitcoin, because the network should be as decentralized as possible. 

Hobby mining rigs like Bitaxe and FutureBit Apollo, which sell from $200 to $500, are now the favorite gadgets of “Bitcoin maximalists.” In January, a FutureBit Apollo processed a block—but only thanks to a nonprofit group donating hash rate (the computational power committed to supporting the Bitcoin network) to the machine from other machines. 

The idea was to “dismantle the proprietary mining empire to make Bitcoin and freedom tech accessible to anyone,” pseudonymous Bitcoin miner Econoalchemist wrote on X at the time.

Even with slim odds, the rise of hobby miners could be fueling the apparent growth of individual block wins in recent months. In an interview with Decrypt, Econoalchemist noted the recent trend of growing solo successes. 

“Every once in a while, and more and more frequently, that single machine [processing a block] is a Bitaxe or similar small mining device found running quietly in someone’s home,” he said.

Optimer’s Scott Norris noted that conglomerates could be processing blocks by not using a big pool, but by having a lot of hashrate.

And even Houston, Texas-based Solo Satoshi, which sells mining equipment like the Bitaxe Gamma, says on its website that using a $180 Bitaxe machine with a hashrate of 1.2 terahash per second would have a 0.00068390% chance per day of mining a block. 

But Matt Howard, who founded Solo Satoshi, said that getting stuck into solo mining isn’t necessarily about the payday.

“The primary goal is more decentralization. Finding a block and getting the Bitcoin reward is a bonus,” he said. “To the Bitcoin maximalists, they understand that mining needs to be decentralized.”

Edited by James Rubin