Great article. I’ve found that learning about the network through hardware like the Bitaxe is both educational and fun, as it provides a hands-on way to support Bitcoin’s decentralized nature. While hobbyist mining is vital for overall network resilience, the reality of today’s industrial-scale dominance means the mathematical probability of finding a solo block is effectively a lottery. It is a powerful way to participate in the network, allowing you to verify the network's consensus rules directly from your desk. Ultimately, running a small miner is less about the immediate payout and more about maintaining a sovereign, distributed system.
Agreed. And being open source also means you can actually learn from it. Like when the community checked bitaxe's logs and saw the parser returns for "mining.notify", they caught the Bassin pool red-handed. Turns out if a block got found, they'd redirect the coins to their own address instead of yours. Open source exposed it, so the malicious code got removed. For reference: https://github.com/duckaxe/bassin/issues/23
I've been at it with a Bitaxe since Fall. It's a neat desk toy. That's it, don't get too excited.
this is about dismantling the proprietary mining empire, I should’ve added it
That is a pretty impressive write up. Bookmarked for when I'm ready to plunge in to the home mining world!
Thank you! I'm very into home mining right now.
Great article. I’ve found that learning about the network through hardware like the Bitaxe is both educational and fun, as it provides a hands-on way to support Bitcoin’s decentralized nature. While hobbyist mining is vital for overall network resilience, the reality of today’s industrial-scale dominance means the mathematical probability of finding a solo block is effectively a lottery. It is a powerful way to participate in the network, allowing you to verify the network's consensus rules directly from your desk. Ultimately, running a small miner is less about the immediate payout and more about maintaining a sovereign, distributed system.
Agreed. And being open source also means you can actually learn from it. Like when the community checked bitaxe's logs and saw the parser returns for "mining.notify", they caught the Bassin pool red-handed. Turns out if a block got found, they'd redirect the coins to their own address instead of yours. Open source exposed it, so the malicious code got removed. For reference: https://github.com/duckaxe/bassin/issues/23
https://litebits.io/ref/RVNQ3KIY