Two Solo Bitcoin Miners Score Full Blocks, ~$300K Each, as U.S. Hash Share Erodes

Two solo wins in one week cut against the narrative that only industrial pools capture Bitcoin’s economics. On Tuesday, a solo miner solved a block and received a payout valued around $295,000. Early Thursday, another independent miner landed the full reward and fees—3.157 BTC in total—worth roughly $304,000 at the time. In a market steered by massive pools, two jackpots in quick succession are a timely reminder: variance still matters.

The mechanics haven’t changed. Bitcoin’s proof-of-work is a probabilistic race—more hash rate improves odds, but luck decides the exact moment. Pools smooth payouts by aggregating computing power and splitting rewards. Solo miners forgo that stability. When they hit, they keep everything. When they don’t, the income drought can be long. That asymmetry—sharp upside, long dry spells—creates a very specific risk-reward profile that many retail miners underestimate and some professionals quietly target when fee conditions look favorable.

Context is important. Large pools still dominate block production. Foundry USA, AntPool, and F2Pool collectively account for nearly 57% of all mined blocks. And there are signs the map is shifting again. U.S.-based operators have been redirecting capital and infrastructure toward artificial intelligence workloads, striking headline deals that equity markets tend to applaud. The byproduct: room for other regions, including China, to claw back share.

That trend showed up throughout 2025. BlocksBridge Consulting reported a steady decline in the block share of North American pools during the year. By December, Foundry USA, MARA Pool, and Luxor Technologies together produced about 35% of Bitcoin blocks—down from more than 40% last January.

Here’s the single takeaway worth focusing on: rare solo hits are not a strategy; they are a signal. They signal that Bitcoin’s incentive design still leaves space at the edges for independent actors, even when consolidation is the rational choice for cash-flow stability. That matters for four reasons:

- Technology: After the April halving, the base subsidy sits at 3.125 BTC. Thursday’s 3.157 BTC payout implies transaction fees added roughly 0.032 BTC on that block. In periods of mempool congestion, fees can spike and temporarily improve the expected value for solo attempts. Tooling and firmware that quickly pivot hash to opportunistic solo mining during fee surges may see more experimentation.

- Behavior: Public “jackpot” moments tend to rekindle interest from home miners and small shops. Some will chase variance without fully modeling the long tail of not finding a block. Others will treat solo as an option—deploying a sliver of hash to capture occasional fat-tail fee events.

- Business: U.S. miners tilting rigs and power contracts toward AI inferencing or training effectively reduce domestic Bitcoin hash share, even if profitability improves at the corporate level. That capital allocation can make sense for shareholders while nudging Bitcoin’s hash distribution toward regions with cheaper energy or different regulatory priorities.

- Governance risk: Pool concentration invites soft-power concerns—template selection, transaction policy, and the potential for coordinated behavior. Solo blocks, while uncommon, are a healthy counterweight. They demonstrate the network’s permissionless property still functions in practice, not just in design documents.

Nobody knows where this week’s solo blocks came from, and that opaqueness is part of Bitcoin’s resilience. The wins don’t forecast a wave of profitable solo mining; they simply underscore that outcomes aren’t linear in a probabilistic system. In a year when North American operators are retooling for AI and China is regaining mining share, two lone blocks landing back-to-back is less a feel-good story and more a useful stress test: the network still leaves room for outliers to matter.