I pulled every block solo.ckpool has found since 2014. Solo mining is having a quiet comeback.
Curiosity got the better of me after that 3.157 BTC solo block last week, so I paged through mempool.space's pool attribution and pulled the lot: 305 blocks since September 2014, 5,572 BTC total, all of it to people mining alone.
The shape surprised me. 2015 was 126 blocks, 2016 was 81 — then it fell off a cliff as the network industrialised. 2019 was the bottom: two blocks in the entire year.
And then it comes back. 2022: 7. 2023: 12. 2024: 16. 2025: 16. 2026 is at 6 with four months to go. For three years now the pool has found a block roughly every 21–24 days.
Caveats, because they matter: this is one pool, so it measures how many people solo mine there, not solo mining overall. And 2015 looks enormous partly because the reward was 25 BTC and the network was around a thousand times smaller — those bars are not comparable to today's.
Still, the trend since 2022 is hard to miss, and it lines up with cheap open-source home miners showing up. Small miners came back, and they're winning again.