🎰 Hashrate Hopium

FIRE BTC #45 - Solo bitcoin mining goes viral

Last weekend I spent half an hour with my 9-year-old daughter setting up a Bitaxe — a tiny open-source bitcoin miner that fits in the palm of your hand. She was hooked right away: plugging in wires, watching the screen light up, and peppering me with questions about what “hashes per second” means. For her, it was a fun Saturday project. For me, it was a small way to teach her about bitcoin and let her see the network in action.

On a whim, I snapped a picture of our little miner and posted it on X. By the next morning, it had blown up: 1.4 million views and counting. My most viral post ever — and ironically, one I never thought twice about. Apparently, I still don’t understand the X algorithm…

Why did it strike such a nerve? Maybe it’s nostalgia for bitcoin’s early days. Maybe it’s the thrill of the mining lottery. Maybe it’s just curiosity about what a device the size of a light bulb can actually do. Whatever the reason, solo mining with rigs like the Bitaxe clearly grabs people’s attention.

This week, let’s talk about what solo mining actually is, how devices like the Bitaxe work, and why a handful of hobbyists like me keep hashing away against impossible odds.

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⛏️ What is solo mining (and why do people do it)?

Mining is what ties bitcoin to the real world. If adding transactions to the ledger were free, it would be costless for a malicious actor to attack the network. But by requiring real-world energy expenditure, bitcoin’s transaction history is shielded from attack and etched permanently into its timechain.

After 15 years of growth, the computing power across the community of bitcoin miners is staggeringly large. Miners use specialized computers called ASICs to race in solving a cryptographic puzzle. You can think of it as a giant guess-and-check game, where the odds of guessing correctly are vanishingly small. The first miner to find the winning solution “wins the block” — meaning they get the block reward (currently 3.125 BTC after the most recent halving) plus all the transaction fees included in that block.

Because the odds of winning a block as an individual miner are so small, most miners join pools to combine their hash power with other miners and share rewards based on their contribution. Instead of perhaps waiting years for the possibility of winning, the pool gives you smaller, regular payouts from rewards that are split amongst participants.

Solo mining, on the other hand, means foregoing a pool and taking your chances alone. If your miner finds a block, you keep 100% of the reward. If not, you get nothing. It’s like buying a lottery ticket.

My machine has about a 1 in 5 million chance of finding a block on any given day. Run it every day for a year, and my odds improve to about 1 in 15,000. Which means, statistically, I could expect to hit a block once every 15,000 years.

I recently wrote about the concept of Longevity Escape Velocity, but I doubt even that will give me a good enough chance.

So why do people solo mine at all? A few reasons:

• The thrill of the jackpot. If lightning strikes, you’re walking away with a big payday.

• Nostalgia. In bitcoin’s early days, mining at home was normal — anyone with a laptop could participate.

• Principle. Even if the odds are low, solo mining reinforces bitcoin’s decentralization.

Every so often, someone actually does hit the jackpot. It happened just last week actually:

The lucky solo miner who won block #912,632 saw 3.147 BTC worth ~$340k hit his wallet! Of course, I checked, and it wasn’t me…this time…

These rare wins fuel the dream and keep people like me plugging in our little miners, knowing full well the odds aren’t in our favor.

Which brings us back to the little machine sitting on my desk: the Bitaxe. What exactly is it, and why are bitcoiners around the world suddenly interested in running them?

⚡ What is a Bitaxe?

The little orange box sitting on my desk is called a Bitaxe. It consists of a small circuit board, a cooling fan, and a small screen. It’s a real bitcoin miner, powered by the same type of ASIC chip used in the big commercial warehouses, just scaled way down.

Specs in plain English:

• Hashrate: About 0.5–1 terahash per second (TH/s). The network recently reached 1 zetahash (1,000 exahashes). That’s a one with 21 zeros — billions of billions of hashes per second — so this is truly a drop in the ocean.

• Power draw: Roughly 10–15 watts. Think about a bright LED bulb — that’s how much energy it uses.

• Noise & size: Fits in your hand, runs quietly. There’s a small, white-noise hum in my office.

• Price: A couple hundred bucks, depending on the version.

An industrial miner like the Antminer S21 costs thousands of dollars and cranks out 200+ TH/s while guzzling over 3,000 watts. One of those could heat your garage and is LOUD.

So why bother with something so small, especially when it’s likely to not provide any ROI?

• Fun: A plug-and-play project that teaches you how mining works, without the heat, noise, and power bill.

• Learning: Open-source firmware (called AxeOS) means you can tinker, track stats, and even hack on it if you want.

• Decentralization: Every Bitaxe chugging away around the world makes bitcoin’s mining landscape a little more diverse.

For me, it’s also a bit of active art in my office — it just looks cool.

🌍 The bigger picture

For me, the Bitaxe is a fun project that serves as a way to teach my kids about bitcoin and give me a cool-looking piece of bitcoin art on my desk.

One of the beautiful things about bitcoin is its permissionless nature.

Although mining has grown to become a serious commercial enterprise and a difficult business to compete in, it still provides a way for anyone to access bitcoin without an intermediary.

Anyone with a miner and a power source can point their hashrate at a mining pool and receive a stream of BTC. In essence, you can purchase bitcoin (with energy) directly from the network. And the network is a consistent, willing buyer of this hashrate.

Beyond cool projects like Bitaxe, people are experimenting with ways to integrate mining into various aspects of daily energy consumption. The heat emitted by a mining rig can be used to heat your home, water, or pool, and bitcoiners are building these systems.

Wasted energy from flared gas and landfills is being captured to produce bitcoin, and mining is used in Texas and other places to help balance demand on the electrical grid.

And that’s the bigger picture: bitcoin mining isn’t just giant warehouses and industrial farms. It’s also dads and daughters tinkering with Bitaxe boards, engineers rerouting waste heat into swimming pools, and entrepreneurs turning flared gas into digital gold.

Most of us solo miners won’t hit the jackpot block — the odds are just too long. But that’s not really the point. The point is that bitcoin still lets anyone, anywhere participate, with nothing more than a plug, a little power, and a bit of curiosity.

And who knows? Maybe one day we’ll defy the odds and be one of the lucky few to hit a block.

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That’s it for this week — thanks for reading!

Until next time,

Trey ✌️