Bitcoin Forum

With difficulty at all-time highs, does solo mining with ASICs even make sense anymore? Has anyone here a solo block in the last year?

If you try and check some blocks mined recently, you will still noticed that one or two blocks are mined by unknown miners. Those unknown miners are not mining pool but solo miners. It is not common but solo miners still mine blocks.

An example is block 883319 which was mined not up to a day ago.

If you mean earn money reliably when you say "make sense", IMO it never was since people start to mine BTC with tons of GPU more than a decade ago.


Yes. According to https://mempool.space/mining/pool/solock (https://mempool.space/mining/pool/solock), most recent ones (among solo miner who use ckpool) was mined 2 weeks ago.

The coinbase tag of that block suggests it belongs to Luxor Pool:
"wz Mined by Luxor Tech$W忮pmm*p΃7C>>
Y"

Which means no all that we see as unknown miner are actually mined by a solo miner. Thanks for letting me know. Let me look for another latest one.

How about block Block 883181 which was mined 2 days ago. I think a solo miner mind the block.

Block 883181: Coinbase (Newly Generated Coins)
y %gނ+g@nY~i ckpoolxmi

883181's coinbase target address has 10 solved blocks since Nov 2023. Either a very lucky solo miner or again some pool effort.

There were successful solo miners in the past, but very few. There are hints, but in the end, you can never say for sure who's behind an "unknown" block find.

just because a ckpool instance has been mined does not mean that a solominer has found something...
with regard to the Coinbase address, it means that someone is either running a minigfarm with its own ckpool instance or someone is running a ckpool instance and shooting purchased hashrates at it

If you visit link i mentioned earlier, solo ckpool have different coinbase tag. It should be something like this,

I got close and even recently I did 22.87t



https://talkimg.com/images/2025/02/18/qm7T5.png
https://talkimg.com/images/2025/02/18/qm9Lz.png



but if you look closely my 48th has .3% shot to hit 1 block in a year.

or 3/1000 I will mine those 2 pieces because I need the heat in the winter.

But it will likely never hit a block.

In fact even though I mine 2 or 3 ph at my host and 50th at home all of that means I should hit a block every 5 or more years.

To realistically hit a block  you need to have 100ph which will hit 1 per 60 days.  and if you have shit luck you can easily go for 300 days which is a ton of power lost.

Yes it is still worth it to try, moreover the power draw is very limited, my advice is never use large device to solo mine, the likes of S19 might be a bad idea because of power draw, but smaller devices are worth it, because it is like you are paying zero electricity fee.

Some miners uses 25watts, and some uses 100watts - 140watts and so on, these power consumption is something you won't bother yourself about, it is the type you can plug in and never look back again.

Bitaxe miner solved a block some time ago, I think in the past week and people are still buying this small device to try their lucks, they are way better than USB miners already.

This is encouraging - a few recent solo mined blocks, with the most recent one mined by 0.5 TH/s miner (there is a thread about it on the board). Go to mempool.space, type "solo" in the search field, and pick 'Solo CK'.

887212   ‎2025-03-10 15:22:04

881676   ‎2025-01-31 14:40:16

875750   ‎2024-12-21 11:15:27

871258   ‎2024-11-20 18:32:47

Another lucky 'solo' hit on the 21st ref it here in the Apollo thread. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5525388.msg65197462#msg65197462)

You won't get the most accurate answer because it is a tricky question, even someone who have been solo mining Bitcoin and not solve a single block yet will advice you to stay away, the funny part is you can get a solo miner and solve a block faster than those that are already on the game for months already.

My answer is you can never know, solo mining is like a gamble, you won't get a accurate answer until you try it out yourself, how am I or anyone suppose to know if you will get lucky or not? The fact is it will be hard since many people want to solve a block too but no luck so far, still I can't advice you not to try.

Make sure you have free electricity though, this is one of the best ways to solo mine Bitcoin, if you are not paying a dime on the power bill then it is all well and good.