On Jan. 30, 2025, several crypto influencer accounts celebrated the solo miner who managed to solve a block and grabbed the entire reward of 3.146 BTC for themselves. However, it turned out that the hashrate of the solo miner was donated by the 300+ members in a fundraiser for 256 Foundation.
Several X accounts and at least one news outlet wrote about a “lucky” solo miner who won the entire mining reward of over 3.1 BTC. The Bitcoin Historian account on X claimed that the $400 worth home miner managed to solve a block with a reward worth $330,000.
Later, it was revealed that the “solo miner” in question used the hashrate aggregated from over 300 miners. This hashrate was donated in the 10-hour-long event, which was the first-ever annual fundraiser launched by 256 Foundation, a non-profit organization with an unusual mission of making Bitcoin mining and Bitcoin in general more accessible and simple for people.
Why does solving the block by a solo miner turn heads?
Back in the day, it was possible to mine hundreds of bitcoins with a usual PC, and some really did it out of curiosity or because they were tech-savvy enough to realize the potential of Bitcoin when these coins cost nothing.
Reportedly, by the end of 2009 there were less than a hundred Bitcoin miners who mined around 2.5 million bitcoins at the lowest difficulty, which increased 90 trillion times since then. Those days, the mining reward was 50 BTC per block (against 3.125 BTC as of today), and mining required nothing but pretty much any then-modern computer. It could be a regular laptop without a fancy GPU.
In 2011, bitcoins still didn’t cost much while the price was volatile. To understand how miniscule the BTC value was, you can take a look at the now famous list of the rewards for competitors in the StarCraft 2 gaming tournament in 2011. The prize fund of $1,000 was distributed among the best four teams, while the fifth (the worst) one received some 25 BTC as a booby prize.
As the BTC value began to rise, the mining difficulty started to take off. Despite the protests from Satoshi Nakamoto, miners started to use GPUs early in the fall of 2010. The affordable opportunity to get bitcoins out of your laptop started to fade away. Participating in mining pools became the remedy for those who still want to earn some bitcoins via mining. The mining pool participants contribute their hashing power to the overall pool’s hashrate and collectively, they are able to solve blocks. The reward is split among the participants.
Things intensified in 2013 when the first application-specific integrated circuits, high-end devices manufactured to mine bitcoins, entered the game. Industrial-level companies fill the factories with long rows of ASICs, doing the only thing–mining new bitcoins. ASICs are too noisy and hard-to-maintain so they are not something you would use at home.
Selling bitcoins that were mined soon became a must to cover the costs of mining. Miners not selling their bitcoins is a new trend of the Trump Trade era when Bitcoin maximalism saw a new bloom amid the promises of crypto-friendly regulations and the BTC price crossing the $100k mark. Before, miners had to sell BTC to stay afloat.
Given how high the difficulty is, even mining via the pool requires costly mining devices. A few mining pools are responsible for most hashrate in Bitcoin mining, meaning that a solo miner has to be really lucky to solve the block before one of the mining pools does it. On the one hand, the mind-boggling difficulty rates save the network from weakly organized bad actors (all the good-willing enthusiasts get blocked, too, though). On the other hand, it creates a situation when only a few organizations are validating all the transactions, and we can only hope that none of them has ill intentions.
Considering the fact that Bitcoin solo mining is not a part of the mainstream narrative in the crypto community, the news about the block solved by a solo miner takes people by surprise.
256 Foundation: bring Bitcoin back to the people
The foundation was created in February 2024. Its goal is “dismantling the proprietary mining empire” and “making Bitcoin and freedom tech accessible for all.”
256 Foundation is busy educating people about Bitcoin so that it would be easier for anyone to engage with it, use it, improve it, or mine it. To make Bitcoin more accessible, 256 Foundation develops and distributes free and open-source software for mining. Giving its users the freedom to do with the software whatever they want is one of the core principles of 256 Foundation, so they can share, upgrade, use, or even sell the solutions made available by 256 Foundation.
On Jan. 30, the foundation held its first fundraiser. In a 10-hour-long event, over 350 entities were mining in the 256 Foundation pool. The hashrate was contributed to the solo miner, which solved the block at around 881 Ph/s rate. Thus, the 256 Foundation community raised 3.146 BTC.
The entities participating in the fundraiser mining event were using the FutureBit Apollo devices. These devices were created as an opposition to the centralization of mining. It allows solo miners to solve blocks again. The message behind 256 Foundation and FutureBit is that mining is more affordable than the big pools and corporations want you to know. They encourage people to try mining Bitcoin and see that it is not impossible if people follow their advice. The FutureBit founder sees it as a David and Goliath situation, and for now, despite the lucky shot, Goliath is at his full strength.
