Talk about winning the lottery. A solo miner walked away with over $200,000 in bitcoin while renting just $75 of hash power.

A solo miner validated block 938,092 around 8:04 a.m. UTC on Tuesday, earning the full 3.125 BTC block reward using hashrate rented through on-demand cloud services, according to blockchain data from Mempool.space.

The miner spent roughly 119,000 satoshis, about $75, to rent 1 petahash per second of computing power and used CKPool, a service that lets individual miners work independently while relying on a pool server to broadcast and submit solutions.

The math on that return is absurd. It's a 2,600x payoff on what amounts to a lottery ticket with better odds than most actual lotteries.

Bitcoin's network processes transactions by bundling them into blocks, which are added to the blockchain roughly every 10 minutes. Miners compete to solve a cryptographic puzzle for the right to add each block, and the winner collects the reward.

The competition is measured in hashrate, the amount of computing power a miner throws at the puzzle. More hashrate means more guesses per second and better odds.

Statistically rare

A solo miner renting 1 petahash is like bringing a slingshot to a gunfight. The odds of that single petahash solving a block before the industrial operations do are vanishingly small, roughly equivalent to finding one specific grain of sand on a beach.

But someone has to win each block, and probability doesn't care about scale. As such, while solo-mined blocks remain statistically rare, they're not as rare as they used to be.

Data from solo mining aggregator Bennet shows 21 individual miners have successfully validated blocks over the past year, earning a combined 66 BTC worth $4.1 million at current prices. That's a 17% increase in solo blocks found year-over-year, with one landing roughly every 17 days on average.

The rise of on-demand hashrate rental has lowered the barrier to entry.

Miners no longer need to own physical hardware to take a shot. Cloud-based services let anyone rent computing power for as little as a few dollars, turning solo mining from an infrastructure-heavy operation into something closer to a scratch-off card with transparent odds.

Meanwhile, the lucky block landed during an interesting moment for bitcoin mining economics.

Network difficulty just climbed to 144.4 trillion after the latest adjustment, a 15% increase that reversed an 11% drop caused by severe U.S. winter storms earlier this month. The climb means miners now need on the order of 144.4 trillion hash attempts, on average, to find a valid block, compared with the very first blocks in 2009.

That storm-driven decline was the sharpest hashrate drop since China's 2021 mining ban, temporarily making blocks easier to find before the network recalibrated.

And for one miner with $75 and good timing, the window was enough.