Don't Let Anyone Tell You You Can't Solo Mine A Bitcoin Block

Marty's Bent

Here's a feel good story to start your week. On Thursday of last week, at block height 920,440 a solo miner with 6 nerdqaxe++'s producing 120-130 TH/s (not a lot of hash rate for the uninitiated) found the hash below the difficulty target and successfully added a block of transactions to the bitcoin ledger and was awarded 3.141 bitcoin (3.125btc subsidy + .16btc in transaction fees) for his work. You absolutely love to see it.

The story gets even better. As Matt from SoloSatoshi has relayed, not only was the mining hardware that was used open source, but the successful solo hasher was using a self-hosted instance of Public-Pool, which is an open-source mining pool software. Think about that for a minute.

A man, running six small computers in what looks to be his living room (picture below) was able to facilitate the settlement of thousands of transactions flowing through a $2.3 TRILLION monetary network. He didn't need to ask for permission to do so. He simply bought some hardware, plugged it in, downloaded some software and started hunting for a hash below the difficulty target. He was rewarded ~$347,000 (at the current price) in bitcoin, which is ~$344,000 more than the miners cost all-in. A solid pay day for someone mining in their living room.

Here's the first hand account shared on Reddit:

via EightofSpace, the solo miner who found a block

It sucks to see that taxes will eat up more than half of his reward. It's actually criminal. But EightofSpace seem to be too bothered. The thrill of mining a solo block and being a part of bitcoin's distributed consensus seems to have produced an amount of stoke worth more than the sats that were produced.

I can't say it enough. This is absolutely incredible and a stark reminder of a few things:

The permissionless nature of bitcoin is still under appreciated. The fact that some Reddit anon can buy some equipment and contribute to the most important and valuable piece of financial infrastructure on the planet is still mind blowing. Almost 17 years in, bitcoin still works as designed.
Home miners have a place in the market and you shouldn't let people who say it's stupid to deter you from participating. As EightofSpace has proven, you can mine a block.
The open source bitcoin mining community is making tremendous strides in all directions right now. The hardware is getting better and more accessible. The firmware is enabling niche use cases. The open-source node and mining pool software is making it easier than ever to self-host a mining set up. The success of this community will be integral to bitcoin's long-term success as the market tries to find creative ways to ensure that hashrate ownership is sufficiently distributed.

On that note, I'd like to take the time to thank everyone in the open-source mining community for putting the work in to make something like block 920,440 possible. Don't listen to the haters deriding you as hobbyists wasting your time. They are obviously wrong.

Solo mining is here, it's working and the experience will only continue to get better.

Bullish.

26 Bitcoin Makes You a Top 100 Company (And Why That Won't Last)

Jonathan Kirkwood emphasized a striking reality that should wake up every business leader: you only need 26 Bitcoin to crack the top 100 publicly traded companies by holdings. This isn't a sign of market maturity; it's a glaring signal of how early we still are. Andrew and Jonathan both stressed that first movers in Bitcoin, whether they entered in 2010, 2012, 2018, or 2022, have accumulated disproportionate advantages that continue compounding. The math is simple but profound: with only 21 million Bitcoin ever to exist, your ability to acquire a meaningful allocation shrinks as adoption accelerates.

"Every year that I'm in Bitcoin, I just realized, man, we are that much earlier than what I thought I was the year before." - Jonathan Kirkwood

Jonathan revealed something counterintuitive from his decade in the space: each passing year proves we're earlier than previously understood. Andrew built on this, explaining that companies moving now can still capture significant allocations at prices that will seem impossibly cheap in hindsight. The window is open, but it's narrowing with every quarterly earnings call that mentions Bitcoin.

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Headlines of the Day

Marathon Pushes to End Bitcoin Mining Double Tax

Saylor Warns 95% of Bitcoin Mined in 21 Days

American Bitcoin Adds 1414 BTC to Holdings

Eric Trump UAE and Others Buying Bitcoin

S&P Rates MicroStrategy with B Minus

Citibank Partners Coinbase for Stablecoin Utility

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Final thought...

Back on my MGMT bullshit.

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