A Bitcoin miner win a $330,000 block reward despite network difficulty surging to a record 126.98 trillion. According to mempool.space data, the block was confirmed at 3:48 am UTC on June 5 and included 3,680 transactions. The miner was operating under the Solo CK pool. He collected a subsidy of 3.125 Bitcoin plus an additional 0.026 BTC in fees. The average fee per transaction in block 899,826 was around $0.29 suggesting relatively light network congestion at the time. Con Kolivas, a software engineer and administrator of the solo mining pool ckpool, said the miner who won the Bitcoin block recently ramped up their hashrate to 259 petahashes per second (PH/s), which is unusually large. Based on the fact that only one worker was connected, he said this was almost certainly a rented hashrate — likely from a cloud or marketplace service — temporarily pointed at the pool to try to win a block. He said the account had been mining on CKPool, but normally it had a much lower hashrate. Therefore, the big hashrate was probably a short-term rental used to “take a shot” at scoring a block reward.

On June 1 the Bitcoin’s mining difficulty hit a new all-time high of 126.98 trillion, according to data from Blockchain.com. The surge in difficulty reflects rising competition among miners and increasing network security. The mining difficulty is adjusted every 2,016 blocks and is driven by the network hashrate, which measures the total computational power dedicated to securing the network. With current difficulty levels, the chances of an individual miner successfully solving a block are minimal. As the Bitcoin’s difficulty continues to increase, such solo mining wins will likely to become even rarer, adding further intrigue when they occur.