Solo Bitcoin mining is showing signs of a surprising revival as independent miners continue to win entire block rewards, even with the network’s hashrate sitting just below record levels at 902 exahashes per second (EH/s), according to Blockchain.com.

Last week, one solo miner secured block 907,283 using the Solo CK pool, earning the full 3.125 BTC reward, worth over $372,000, along with $3,436 in transaction fees. This wasn’t an isolated case. Similar solo wins were recorded in July, June, March, and February by miners with as little as 2.3 petahashes (PH/s) of power.

Samuel Li, CTO of mining firm ASICKey, explained that modern solo miners are equipped with highly efficient hardware capable of delivering serious hashrate without massive energy consumption. Still, solo mining remains a high-stakes gamble. At today’s network size, a miner with just 1 PH/s has a 1 in 650,000 chance of finding a block every 10 minutes.

So why do it? Some miners are in it for the dream payoff. Others are motivated by decentralization, aiming to counter the influence of large mining pools. Foundry USA currently controls 29.3% of the global hashrate, followed by AntPool (16.2%), ViaBTC (12.0%), and F2Pool (11.6%). Such concentration raises concerns over potential 51% attacks.

Li noted that while the odds are long, the trend shows that solo miners running energy-efficient setups can occasionally strike gold—making the network more diverse and aligned with Bitcoin’s original decentralized ethos.