The Bitcoin miner’s hash rate represented around 0.002% of the network’s total computational power. A solo Bitcoin miner was rewarded for adding block 780,112 to Bitcoin’s blockchain, beating the odds as countless others raced toward the same goal.
The miner used the Solo CK Pool mining service to establish a solo mining pool, where they produced a valid hash for the block and received a reward of 6.25 BTC and a fee reward of around 0.63 BTC—worth about $148,000—according to BTC.com’s Bitcoin blockchain explorer.
The solo miner who produced the valid hash was lucky to have found it within such a short time frame, as it would typically take a miner much longer to create a valid transaction given the limited computing power they used. In fact, a miner of this size will solve a block on average about once every 10 months.
According to @ckpooldev, the miner who discovered the block had an average hashing power of 6.7 PH/s (petahashes per second). At the time the block was added to the blockchain, the total hash rate of Bitcoin was approximately 308,262 PH/s. This implies that the miner’s hash rate accounted for only 2% of the entire computational power of the blockchain.
An account on the Bitcoin forum bitcointalk.org stepped forward to claim responsibility for producing the valid hash, saying he rented extra power for less than a day using a self-proclaimed “secret weapon.”