When I first entered the Bitcoin scene in 2017, I changed my Twitter handle (now X) to “@nikcantmine.” (At the time, this was a joke that I found funny since I didn’t have the resources to mine BTC in high school.) But today, I officially became “CAN’s nickname is mine.”
Last week I was given a Bitaxe, a fully open-source (and very small) Bitcoin miner, while I attended the Human Rights Foundation’s Bitcoin Summit in Nashville. This is a fairly convenient device that allows you to independently connect to a mining pool or solo mining.
Nick CAN mine pic.twitter.com/Mv1OuTyvBM
— Nikolaus (@nikcantmine) October 8, 2024
Setting up the device was quite easy. It was fun to tinker with, and being able to hold the miner in the palm of your hand felt pretty cypherpunk. This seems like a great way to introduce someone to mining on a very small scale.
Of course, by connecting this miner to the pool, I will not make any real profit, since this miner is negligible compared to the power that is actually needed to mine BTC profitably today. But solo mining with this machine becomes a little more interesting.
Earlier this summer, solo miner Bitaxe actually beat the odds and mined a solo block, earning a block reward of 3.25 BTC, which is currently worth over $205,000.
Congratulations to the miner on the first Bitaxe block, this is only a tiny 3rd for finding the 290th solo block on Solo ckpool! With such a large hashrate, a block will be found on average once every 3500 YEARS, or 1 chance in 1.2 MILLION per day! https://t.co/5Wtu9jydsF pic.twitter.com/D5sSzug42P
— Dr. -ck (@ckpooldev) July 24, 2024
The data shows that this miner was steadily mining at 500Gh/s hashrate for several weeks and then increased his hashrate to 3TH right before the block was found. I’m somewhat encouraged to know that my Bitaxe is currently mining at over 634 GHz/s.
But I’m not getting my hopes up, considering I don’t have any extra hashrate to add, and the odds of finding a block with such a small hashrate are about 1 in 1.2 million per day, according to Solo Ckpool admin Dr. – ck.
However, I got this machine for free, so I thought, why not plug it in and see what happens? I’ll deal with the electric bill later once I see how much it costs and re-evaluate whether it’s worth continuing. Having used it, I probably wouldn’t buy it based on its economics alone since I wouldn’t be able to get my money back unless I won the lottery. But I would probably buy one just as a fun toy.
The odds of me finding a block are 0.001% per day, but honestly I’m just having fun running around hoping to find a single block. I can keep my Bitaxe running 24/7 if I want because it only requires a 5-volt power cord plugged into a regular electrical outlet. I installed it right here on my desk next to my monitor.
Given the new Coldcard Q I just received, I couldn’t stop thinking about how cool it would be to win a single block mine with it and send that BTC reward to a new Bitcoin wallet.
This will mean that there is no public record of me receiving Bitaxe or Coldcard (other than this article) and I will have some sweet KYC-free Bitcoin.
This article is Take. The opinions expressed are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
