Could a solo miner actually have struck gold?

With the current Bitcoin mining difficulty, it seems almost impossible for a solo miner to successfully mine a block. Just checked the mempool and saw something unexpected.

Yeah, a lot of unknown miners are actually big private pools. They just don’t disclose their identities.

Exactly! Unknown miners pop up more often than you think. Just earlier, block 910265 was mined by an unknown miner too, just 27 minutes after block 910201. Plus, another unknown miner got block 910248. All this happened in under 13 hours.

Totally get that. It’s frustrating not knowing how much terahash went into mining that block. But hey, at least it gives us hope that we might hit a block someday instead of just throwing money at gambling. I’d take that challenge any day.

If you wanna see solo hash rate stats, check out -ck's thread in the Pools section. A few years back, a Compaq-F with around 600GHs hit one. Most solo miners are just renting insane hash power though. Seen some pools with over 1 EHs and still no block.

For real, there are so many pools and a lot of them keep their stats under wraps. If you want to track solo blocks, btc.solopool.org usually has that info.

I see what you're saying. But just because it’s marked as unknown, doesn’t mean it’s a solo miner. Most times, it’s just a pool that hasn’t tagged their transactions yet. Every now and then though, a real solo miner manages to snag a block and that gets everyone excited.

Looking at the Coinbase messages, it seems like this wasn’t a solo miner. Found another block, 909944, with nearly the same Coinbase info, minus one character. This could be a big mining company, not a solo effort.

Yeah, it’s super rare for solo miners to hit a block these days. It’s like winning the lottery. The odds are tiny but still there. Always fun to see when it happens.

I thought it was impossible too. But now I see how many pools go unidentified. I used to think unknown meant solo miners, but there are way more pools than we recognize. People usually only know the top pools like BTC and Foundry USA.