Another Bitcoin (BTC) miner from the Solo CK mining pool has solo mined a new block on the Bitcoin blockchain, earning a block reward of 6.25 BTC (over $220,000 at current prices) as a result. The event took place on Monday at a block height of 720,175.
Solo mining consists of attempting to validate blocks by a single miner, without teaming efforts with other miners on a mining pool, and running a full blockchain node. Without significant hashing capabilities, the odds of validating a block tend to be extremely unlikely.
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To increase these odds and avoid the costs associated with solo mining, miners generally come together in pools to combine their hash power, increasing the chances of validating a block and ultimately sharing the spoils if they succeed.
According to a recent tweet from CKPool admin Con Kolivas, this solo miner had a hash power of approximately 86 terahashes per second. Hash power determines the computational speed at which a computer can perform the cryptographic functions needed to mine cryptocurrency and validate a block for proof-of-work blockchains like Bitcoin.
The miner in question had less hash power than a single S9 mining machine; a relatively small amount of computational power, making this a very unlikely event.
Even more remarkable is the fact that only two weeks ago, another solo miner from the Solo CK mining pool also completed a similar task by successfully solving a valid block. “To say this is very rare is an understatement,” Bitcoin council member Hass McCook told Cointelegraph at the time.
Despite its name, CKPool isn’t a regular mining pool, it's a service that allows solo mining without dealing with the costs and troubles of running a full Bitcoin node.
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