Can you find a bitcoin block on your own? What solo mining is, and the odds for one machine

Solo mining means keeping a whole block reward, about 3.125 bitcoin, if your machine finds one. We work out the odds for one common machine, show where the few winners come from, and explain why a pool pays the same average in daily pieces.

TL;DR

Solo mining means you keep the whole block, about 3.125 bitcoin plus fees, but only if your machine is the one that finds it.
One 270 TH/s machine has about a 1-in-27,600 chance a day: an average wait of roughly 76 years, and about a 5% chance in four years.
A pool pays the same average income as solo mining, in small pieces most days, which is why machines are run through pools.

A block pays about $250,000, and someone wins one every ten minutes

Every ten minutes or so, one miner somewhere in the world finds the next block of bitcoin transactions and is paid for it. The payment is 3.125 new bitcoin plus the fees from the transactions inside the block. At $80,520, the price on 25 October 2026, the 3.125 coins alone are worth about $251,600.

It is natural to wonder whether your own machine could win one. Mining on your own, with no one else's help, is called solo mining. If you win, you keep the whole block. This guide works through what that means for a single machine, step by step, so you can see the odds for yourself.

If the words "hash" and "terahash" are new, the guide to what a hash is comes first. The rest needs only simple arithmetic.

Finding a block is a lottery, and every guess is a ticket

A miner does not solve a puzzle by thinking. It makes guesses, billions upon billions of them each second, and each guess has a tiny chance of being the winning one. The more guesses a machine makes, the more tickets it holds. A hash is one guess, and the TH/s on the spec sheet is how many million-million guesses the machine makes each second.

The network sets the difficulty so that all the machines together find a block about every ten minutes, which is about 144 blocks a day. If the network is making twice as many guesses, the difficulty rises so that the blocks still come at the same pace. You can read how that works in the difficulty guide.

Each guess is independent. A machine that has run for a year without winning is no closer to a win than one switched on this morning, just as a coin that has landed heads ten times is no more likely to land tails. There is no queue to wait in and no payment that is "due".

So your chance of winning any one block is your share of all the guesses being made. That is the whole idea, and everything below follows from it.

Your chance of winning a block is your share of all the guesses the network is making.

One machine's share of the network is about a quarter of a millionth of a percent

Take a common air-cooled machine, the Antminer S21 XP, which is rated at 270 TH/s. Over the seven days to 25 October 2026 the network averaged about 1,075 EH/s on our hashrate chart. One exahash is a million terahashes, so the network was making about 1,075,000,000 TH/s of guesses.

Step one: divide the machine by the network. 270 divided by 1,075,000,000 is about 0.00000025, or 0.000025% of all the guesses.

Step two: multiply by the 144 blocks that arrive each day. That gives a chance of about 0.0036% that this machine wins a block on any given day, or roughly 1 in 27,600.

Step three: turn it into a wait. On average, a 1-in-27,600 chance a day comes up once in 27,600 days, which is about 76 years. That is an average, not a schedule. The machine could win tomorrow or never.

Over one year the chance of winning at least one block is about 1.3%. Over a four-year working life it is about 5%. Put another way, if 20 people each ran this machine for four years, you would expect about one of them to win a block, and the other 19 to win nothing from this route at all.

Chart: Bitcoin's network hashrate over the last year. A single machine's chance of winning a block is its hashrate divided by this line, so a higher line means smaller odds for everyone. Open the chart

A few small miners do win, and it is still a lottery

The odds are not zero, and sometimes a small miner wins. On 6 April 2026, CoinDesk reported that a solo miner with about 230 TH/s found block 943,411 and collected 3.139 bitcoin, worth about $210,000 at the time. The article said the miner "faced roughly 1-in-28,000 odds of finding a block on any given day", close to the figure we worked out for a 270 TH/s machine.

The same report said it was the 312th solo block found through that service since it began, and the first since 28 February. It also said solo pools found 20 bitcoin blocks over the previous 12 months. That is 20 out of roughly 52,000 blocks, which is why a win makes the news.

Reading it the other way round: for every winner there are a great many machines that never won. The winners are visible and the waiting is not.

How a solo service works

You do not need your own full bitcoin node to mine solo. Services such as solo.ckpool.org let your machine connect much as it would to a pool. The service's own page says: "This is NOT a pool despite its name; it is a service to allow miners to mine solo blocks."

There is no sign-up. You enter your bitcoin address as the username, and if your machine finds a block the reward is paid to that address. The page says the fee is 2% on top of the transaction fees. If you are not sure what a bitcoin address is, the wallet address guide explains it.

The page is also frank about small machines: "Hashrates below 100GH are not recommended to mine Bitcoin as it is unrealistic they will ever find a block." 100 GH/s is a tenth of one terahash a second. On the same arithmetic as above, such a device would expect to wait more than 200,000 years.

A pool pays the same average income in small pieces

Here is the part that surprises people. On average, a solo miner and a pool miner earn about the same. Our 270 TH/s machine's share of 144 blocks a day, at 3.125 coins each, comes to about 0.00011 bitcoin a day. The hashprice on 24 October was about 0.00045 bitcoin per petahash per day, which for 0.27 petahash is about 0.00012. The small difference is the transaction fees, which the hashprice includes.

What changes is how the money arrives. Solo mining pays nothing for decades and then a very large sum, once, to the lucky few. A pool lets thousands of machines guess together and shares each block's reward out according to the work each one did, so you are paid a small amount, most days.

The pool charges a fee for that, and the payout guide explains the common payment methods. The fee buys you something solo mining cannot give you: income you can plan around, day after day.

What it means for a miner

A machine is bought to earn every day, so the question to ask is what it earns each day for the electricity it uses, not whether it might one day win a block. That is hashprice, efficiency and the power rate, and the spec sheet guide shows how to read the first two.

Machines we host mine through pools, and the coins they earn go to the owner's own bitcoin address. A daily, predictable return is what lets a miner keep the coins, pay the power from the earnings, and plan the next machine.

Solo mining is a fair thing to know about, and some people enjoy the long shot. As income, though, it is the same average paid out so rarely that nobody should plan around it. The output of a machine is never guaranteed, but a pool turns it into something you can count on arriving.

Sources and further reading

Solo bitcoin miner overcomes 1-in-28,000 odds to secure $210,000 block reward — CoinDesk, 6 Apr 2026
solo.ckpool.org — CKpool, Accessed 25 Oct 2026

Disclosure

Firsthand Bitcoin sells and hosts mining hardware, including this machine. No manufacturer, distributor or affiliate programme paid for or reviewed this page and we take no commission on the links above. Historical figures are computed from daily bitcoin price and network hashprice, each day valued at its own prices. Nothing here is investment advice.