A single bitcoin miner solved block height 960804 on Aug. 2, 2026, at 02:11 UTC, earning the full block reward of about 3.1569 BTC, worth roughly $200,000 at the time.
Key Takeaways
A solo miner using CKPool claimed block 960804’s 3.1569 BTC reward on Aug. 2, 2026.The win marked CKPool’s 317th solo block, according to developer Con Kolivas.Bitcoin’s next difficulty adjustment is expected in mid-August 2026 after recent hashrate shifts.CKPool developer Dr -ck, whose real name is Con Kolivas, confirmed the win on X. He described the miner’s computing power as “wildly variable, presumably rental, peaking at 100 PH.” PH stands for petahash per second, a measure of how many calculations a mining rig can perform each second while trying to solve a block.
That peak represented about 0.011% of Bitcoin’s total network hashrate, which sat near 924 exahashes per second at the time. An exahash is a quintillion hashes per second, or a million petahashes. At that level of computing power, a miner could expect to find a block roughly once every 64 days if the hashrate held steady. That is a far shorter wait than the decades a small home setup would typically face.
Why Solo Mining Still WorksCKPool takes a small cut, commonly cited around 2%, of any block its solo users find. The service has now facilitated 317 such wins.
Dr -ck said the miner’s hashrate pattern pointed away from a fixed home setup and toward rented computing power, a practice that lets people temporarily access far more hashrate than they own. Rental markets have made solo wins like this one more reachable than pure hobbyist odds would suggest, though success remains far from guaranteed on any given day.
The Developer’s Own WordsDr -ck pointed to how deterministic the timing looked in hindsight. “This block was solved on the same main pool that has solved most of the blocks, purely as a function of its hashrate,” he wrote. “AU, SG, and US East are yet to solve blocks.” He added that the find was “virtually deterministic at almost exactly 100% diff,” referring to the pool’s mining difficulty setting at the moment the block was found.
Why It Matters for Bitcoin’s Bigger PictureThe 3.125 BTC subsidy stays fixed until Bitcoin’s next halving, expected near block 1,050,000 around spring 2028, when it drops to 1.5625 BTC. Fees will carry more weight in mining rewards over time as that subsidy keeps shrinking.
What to Watch NextHero/Feature image source: Mempool.space
