The block carried Bitcoin’s 3.125 BTC subsidy plus about 0.032 BTC in fees, while CKPool developer Dr -ck said the miner’s hashrate likely came from rented capacity peaking at 100 PH.
A solo miner using CKPool, a service that lets users mine through shared infrastructure without running their own Bitcoin node, solved block 960804 and delivered the 317th solo block found through the pool. The reward included the fixed 3.125 BTC subsidy and about 0.032 BTC in transaction fees from 4,243 transactions, with blockchain explorers including mempool.space, Blockchain.com and Blockchair.com attributing the payout to Solo CKPool. CKPool developer Dr -ck, whose real name is Con Kolivas, said the miner’s computing power was “wildly variable, presumably rental, peaking at 100 PH,” or petahashes per second (one quadrillion hashes a second), equal to about 0.011% of the network’s roughly 924 exahashes per second at the time. He also said this was the first mainnet block solved since Stratum V2 (mining pool communication upgrade) code was added to the ckpool codebase, although the winning block itself used the older Stratum V1 protocol. The episode highlights how rented hashrate can make solo mining more reachable even as Bitcoin mining remains concentrated among large pools, while the 3.125 BTC subsidy stays in place until the next halving near block 1,050,000 around spring 2028 and fees gradually become more important to miner revenue.