[DigitalToday reporter Jinju Hong (홍진주)] A solo bitcoin (BTC) miner used rented hashrate worth about $75, or about 100,000 won, to obtain rewards worth more than $200,000, or about 288.5 million won.

On Feb. 24, blockchain outlet Cointelegraph reported that the miner received a 3.125 BTC block reward, earning about $200,000. The case has drawn attention as an example of a full block being validated alone with small capital.

Bitcoin mining technology company Braiins said the miner spent about 119,000 satoshis, worth about $75 at the time, to rent 1 petahash per second (PH/s) of hashrate, and also paid a separate small solo mining fee. The miner succeeded in validating the block by sending work and submitting a solution via CKPool.

Mempool.space data showed the miner succeeded in validating block 938092 at 8:04 a.m. UTC on Tuesday. Total revenue, including the block subsidy and transaction fees, was about 3.128 BTC. Transaction fees were 0.003 BTC, worth about $180. The total reward value at the time the block was created was listed at about $197,546.

Cases of mining a full block solo are rare, but this showed that, in theory, it is possible to obtain a block reward with rented hashrate costing less than $100.

Solo mining on the bitcoin network has a very low probability compared with large mining pools. Still, cases are reported from time to time of individual miners successfully mining blocks. Over the past year, 21 solo miners mined a total of 66 BTC, worth about $4.1 million, up 17 percent from a year earlier. Solo blocks are being created at an average interval of 17.2 days.

Separately, bitcoin mining difficulty rose 15 percent to 144.4 trillion as hashrate recovered recently. That made up for an 11 percent plunge earlier this month caused by a winter storm in the United States, effectively reversing the biggest hashrate drop since China banned mining in 2021.

Hashrate refers to the bitcoin network's total computing power, and difficulty is adjusted every 2,016 blocks, or about two weeks, to keep the average block creation time at 10 minutes.