In anything we do, there's always a time for us to bear the cost of it and also another time where we can enjoy from the efforts we have rendered in the past, that is how a balanced life should be, not that we won't be challenged at all, but when ever we had one, we should also have another to counter the first we had and make things happier on us, miners have their own challenging times too, just as we also know of how they mostly enjoy increasing mining fee rate during the period the mempool was congested and transaction fee becomes higher, this serves as his own seasons and opportunity to smile being a miner.

Well as you know, the pool mining thing comes with its own costs as well (electric; miner sales price ROI; rent) so it's not like that's a money printer either It's only for people with the precise conditions necessary to make it work out well.

Does anyone have a list of solo-mining records? it would be interesting to see who has made the highest amounts of mined blocks with an one-man operation. Electricity costs aside, all things equal we could see what of these machines are the best performers. I remember reading something about one called BitAxe that was apparently kicking ass in this small-miner department. I was even considering buying some to try my luck if after doing the numbers I decided that it makes sense to do so, but no before I get some numbers to compare how it works vs other counterparts that could be compared to.

At the end of the day if you care about Bitcoin you should be mining it even if you mine it at a loss, this helps the network and ultimately helps your holdings, so it would be like paying a subscription fee to something sort of thing. Like paying someone to store your gold in a vault, but your miners are the vault.

Yah an Apollo node reported the block and it had a diff of 393T.  393,692,033,929,762 to be precise.
https://bitaps.com/888737
 What is not known is what miner was used - the one in the Apollo (at most a couple Th) or did the winner point a buttload of rental hash at it?

Not the first time that we hear this kind of stories,

A solo Bitcoin miner just won block 718214 reward worth 6.25 $BTC.

Not sure what the odds though, but probably the term should be "small" miner instead of "solo" miner.

It's not a first time and you can always invest money and try your luck with solo mining. Buying your lottery ticket and waiting massive luckiness knocks your doors.

If you're interested in and want to try, there is a guide.
NERDMINER: Bitcoin lottery miners

good news like this motivate small guys to start out their solo mining and increase decentralization though just very little.

just solving one block can already gives massive change toward your finance, definitely worth to do for hobbyist if i'm being honest.

i'm also thinking of doing this exact thing, i know i should tune down my expectation, but also, why not? and it's fun but I know this will cost good money.

Network hashrate significant drop can help solo miners but not too much because solo miners have very small hashrates compare to Bitcoin network hashrate. Like a Hashrate migration out of China mainland did not help solo miners finding more Bitcoin blocks than before.

In bear market, there are times of Mining capitulation but after that a new bull market comes, and many new miners join hence Bitcoin network hashrates and difficulty continue considerable increases.

https://www.bitcoinmagazinepro.com/charts/hash-ribbons/

It should be pointed out that the solo's ^^ pointed at -ck's solo pool covered a wide range of hash rates. Last year one of Sidehack's Compac-F USB sticks (around 350THs) found a block but most of the 'winners' were pointing a ton of rental hash at it, often as much as 500 or more PH. I believe there are also at least 2 BitAxe's in the mix that were running between 400GHs-4THs. All blocks can be searched for on -ck's pool thread here.
Most recent block there was on Mar. 10 by a BitAxe (bitaxeultra4) running 486GHs.

Those using rental hash of course did not clear anywhere near as much profit as that lil' Compac-F or BitAxe's did...

Well, if you cannot do anything with your money and buy a miner that's costly, you can do that. But it's not the only way to help the network, run a node if you want to help. But spending a lot of money for miners, won't be worth it when the difficulty of mining keeps on increasing. Good for that solo miner and it might have been long for that guy until he got that reward. It's another lottery block for that person and I think I've seen the same stories for the past several years.