I have one but I only had it running briefly. I can't find a good spot for it. I know it's small, but my wife is sensitive about weird electronic devices around the house.

Any miner in theory can mine solo or in a pool.

It's a relatively small ASIC, kinda like those USB miners.

The cost of it is probably more than what you can ever mine with it though, but it's cheap if you just want to learn about mining.

BitAxe is great! It's fully open source hardware and software. Two guys from my local BitDevs meetup made it happen. Skot9000 started the project and designed the hardware. Johnny9 backwards engineered the firmware.

It's super easy to set up. You plug it in and connect to the wifi network displayed on the screen. Configure it with your wifi credentials and reboot the bitaxe. Open a browser on your local network and browse to the IP displayed on the screen. Configure your mining pool credentials, save. You might need to reboot it again. Congrats! You are hashing.

The thing that sets this project apart from similar efforts is the hash efficiency. A nerdminer does CPU mining on an ESP32. BitAxe uses an individual ASIC chip from an S19, I think. So you are getting industrial strength hash efficiency in an adorable desk toy format. It's like a cool knick knack that puts out 500 GH/s. I put mine on a shelf with a bunch of bitcoin books and a laptop full node. When it is quiet I can hear it 'breathe' as the fan alternates speeds to maintain target temp on the chip.

In general, mining profitability will almost always be lower than just buying BTC on the spot market. This starts to change if you operate at a very large scale or have access to free or subsidized hardware or electricity. BitAxe is at the extreme end of unprofitability. Due to the high relative cost of the hardware you might have to mine continuously for a century to break even.

Skot is working on a hex board that will fit 6 ASIC chips. It will definitely help with cost efficiency. If you are interested in this stuff definitely check out the Open Source Miners United initiative.

Cons: -not economical

Pros: -open source hardware/firmware movement -takes up minimal space -quieter than big asics

They're mainly an educational tool but there's a bigger movement going on.

It's for education and a little of fun mostly.

Aside from participatting in the lottery, by contributting hash power to the network you are literally increasing the bitcoin network security and the valur of btc by consequence. It's always a net positive.

It only earn like 32sats per day, so the ROI is non existent. Solo mining is the way to go, but then the chances to win a block is astrologically low.

Personally I started off solomining but changed to pool mining later on. Helps me to zap some SATs without needing to move SATs around from onchain

Price wise Avalon Nano 3 seems better option. https://mineshop.eu/avalon-nano-3/

Pros: cheap, you can mine 3.25 Bitcoin, small Cons: expensive in terms of Bitcoin, most likely you won't mine 3.25 Bitcoin, unavailable in my country

I have one mining in a pool. It contributes around 400 GH/s on average. So it doesn’t earn many says, but it does also use very small amounts of power compared to other miners.

Been wanting to get one to have I think it looks dope and your contributing even if it's small it's something been really thinking of getting one just to have thanks for this post

Good question. I will also learn from comments. This post will help me to know some good stuff.

If you want it for learning purpose, yes you can. But if you think you can ean from it, it's a no.

That's what my friend said to me while I was discussing with him about miners.

Once all the public miners go bust or become cucked it will be the bitaxes that will save the day

makes for a fun toy

I think it's way too expensive. The BM1366 chip costs like $15, so I don't understand why a whole unit costs like 10x that.