Just saw this wild story about a solo miner who rented like $75 worth of computing power and somehow managed to find a block, walking away with over 3.1 BTC. At current prices that's roughly $200K, which is absolutely insane for a $75 investment. The odds on this are brutal too—statistically this kind of thing should only happen once every 21 years for that amount of hash power.

Mining pools dominate Bitcoin block discovery because they throw massive computational resources at it, so solo mining is basically lottery territory. But apparently the lottery has been hitting lately. Earlier this year we saw a couple other solo miners nail similar rewards worth around $300K each, and late last year someone else scored over $280K. These wins are getting more interesting because the network's total hash power keeps climbing—it's at like 1.1 Zhash/s now, which is way up from 730 Ehash/s a year ago.

What's kind of wild is that some of this hash power shift might be moving away from BTC mining entirely. Big mining companies are apparently getting pressure to pivot toward AI compute instead, which is where the real demand is right now. So you've got this growing network competing for fewer dedicated solo miners, which somehow makes these big solo wins feel even more improbable. Renting through platforms like Braiins makes it accessible at least, but man, the odds are not in your favor.