Has anyone solo mined a Bitcoin block?

What has been reported

News reports and pool announcements describe several blocks found by hobby-scale solo miners. In November 2025, a hobbyist running several Bitaxe devices totalling around 6 TH/s was reported to have found a block through Solo CKPool, a reward worth roughly a quarter of a million dollars at the time. In July 2026, a single Bitaxe hashing at around 1 TH/s was reported to have solved a block through Public Pool, with a reward of about 3.14 BTC, around $200,000 at the time, described as the second known case of a lone Bitaxe finding a solo block on that pool. Reports also describe larger home miners and small groups finding blocks, and a dozen or so solo blocks in the first half of 2026.

These are news reports and pool announcements. Details such as rewards in dollars depend on the bitcoin price at the time. Treat figures as approximate.

Why wins like this are expected

Suppose 50,000 people run Bitaxe-class miners, each with about a 1 in 5.6 million chance per day. The chance that at least one of them finds a block on any given day is about 0.9%, so over a year you would expect around three such blocks across the whole community. That is roughly what is reported. Each winner is a surprise, but collectively they are as predictable as a jackpot winner in a lottery with millions of tickets.

Survivorship bias

We hear about the Bitaxe that won, not the tens of thousands that did not. A win is news precisely because it is rare. If you buy a device because of the stories, you are buying a lottery ticket and should judge it as one: a small, steady cost for a very small chance.

What a win looks like

1. 1The device submits a valid block to the solo pool.
2. 2The pool broadcasts it, and the network confirms it.
3. 3After the standard maturity period of 100 blocks, the reward is spendable, minus the pool's fee.
4. 4The reward is paid to the Bitcoin address the miner configured.

Is it a reason to buy a miner?

Only if you are happy to treat it as a lottery ticket with an electricity bill. The odds for one device are about 1 in 6 million a day and an expected wait of thousands of years. Use the Bitcoin lottery miner odds calculator to see them for your hardware, then decide as you would for any ticket.

How to read pool statistics

• Solo pools publish block-found histories and best shares. You can see how often small and large miners win.
• A "best share" shows how close a device came, which is just the luckiest hash so far. It is not a measure of progress.
• Announcements of a "block found" are usually accompanied by a block height you can check on any block explorer.

How to verify a claimed solo block yourself

1. 1Get the block height or hash from the announcement.
2. 2Open a block explorer such as mempool.space and search for it.
3. 3Look at the mining pool shown for the block, for example a solo pool.
4. 4Check the reward, which should be the subsidy plus fees, paid to a single address.
5. 5Be sceptical of any claim that does not give a block height you can check.

A verified example

Block 957,382, mined on 10 July 2026 through the Public Pool solo pool, paid a total reward of about 3.138 BTC to a single miner, and can be looked up on any block explorer. Reports attributed it to a small hobby device. The chain data confirms the block, pool and reward; other details come from the winner and press coverage.