Solo Miner's Rented Hash Pays Off with $200K Block Reward

A solo Bitcoin miner made headlines after validating an entire block on Tuesday using rented computing power for approximately $75. The miner earned a block reward of 3.125 Bitcoin, worth around $200,000 at current prices.

The miner used Braiins, a firm that operates an on-demand hash rate marketplace, to rent 1 petahash per second (PH/s) of computing power for the session. The cost was around 119,000 satoshis, in addition to a small solo-mining fee.

On-demand hash rate allows participants to mine without owning or operating physical hardware. At the current Bitcoin network hash rate, a 1 PH/s operation would statistically find a block approximately once every 1.1 million blocks, equivalent to roughly 21 years of continuous mining.