2 solo-miners each mined 1 block on the bitcoin network

[zina13]

The 16.4 TH/s case is a good illustration of why solo pools work at all: with the network at ~1.1 ZH/s that hashrate gets roughly one shot at a block every 2 years or so.

[m2017]

It seems that CKPool has a higher luck rate. Another solo miner has managed to mine a BTC-block, specifically block number #974,893, earning a reward of 3,1335BTC (~$230k.)
 
This time, the miner's computing power was approximately 581 TH/s.

As you may recall, this (mining an entire block as a solo miner) has already happened (twice) in October.

People do win the lottery, too but that happens more often than finding a block via solo mining. It is extremely rare to successfully mine a block when you have a low hashrate.

But as you can see, the chances are still greater than 0.

Just look at the market for solo-mining hardware, it’s flooded with offerings from various manufacturers ranging from simple mini ASICs to water heaters and space heaters that double as Bitcoin miners. I am certain that the volume of these ASICs being sold far exceeds the actual profit they generate.

Because during a gold rush, the "shovel seller" ends up wealthier than the "ordinary digger".

Just to put into perspective the insane chance of hitting a block with 16 TH/s, it is 0.08% per year. That's in 1 in 1200 years. Lucky bastard! Someone from the Roman Empire in AD 800 would have around 64% of having hit that, if he was still running it.

And just imagine that he was mining along the way, for instance, by using this ASIC as a space heater. In other words, these blocks could have been mined entirely by accident, as a byproduct.

[FP91G]

It seems that CKPool has a higher luck rate. Another solo miner has managed to mine a BTC-block, specifically block number #974,893, earning a reward of 3,1335BTC (~$230k.)
 
This time, the miner's computing power was approximately 581 TH/s.

As you may recall, this (mining an entire block as a solo miner) has already happened (twice) in October.

People do win the lottery, too but that happens more often than finding a block via solo mining. It is extremely rare to successfully mine a block when you have a low hashrate.

But as you can see, the chances are still greater than 0.

Just look at the market for solo-mining hardware, it’s flooded with offerings from various manufacturers ranging from simple mini ASICs to water heaters and space heaters that double as Bitcoin miners. I am certain that the volume of these ASICs being sold far exceeds the actual profit they generate.

Because during a gold rush, the "shovel seller" ends up wealthier than the "ordinary digger".

Someone always wins the lottery, but a block found via solo mining isn't a great example here, the miner’s hashrate on the pool was over 550 terahashes, hardly the kind of setup one would use for solo mining. Furthermore, we have no way of knowing how long the miner had been trying their luck at solo mining.