What is a Bitaxe? - Bittr Academy

The Bitaxe is the world’s first open-source ASIC miner – completely transparent, community-driven, and designed so that anyone can build their own Bitcoin miner.

Even if it might sound like a toy at first, there’s more to Bitaxe than meets the eye.

When most people think of Bitcoin mining, they imagine huge warehouses full of noisy ASICs, operated by corporations in remote locations. That makes mining feel out of reach – and unappealing – for the average Bitcoiner. Especially in Europe, high electricity costs mean solo mining is often dismissed entirely.

Mining Pool Centralization

Bitcoin is built on the idea of decentralization. It’s meant to be resistant to attack and control. But in practice, we’re seeing more and more of the global hashrate being concentrated in a few large mining pools:

As of June 2025, the top three mining pools (Foundry USA, AntPool, F2Pool) control around 55–60% of the total hashrate.
90% of the hashrate is concentrated in just six pools. The Bitaxe project was deliberately created as a counter to this growing centralization of mining power.

All hardware and firmware files of the Bitaxe are open source. Anyone can build, modify, and run their own miner. A fully assembled Bitaxe costs just a few hundred euros – making mining accessible to individual users.

Bitaxe is more than hardware – it’s a decentralizing idea. The goal is to bring mining back to the many. It typically uses a BM1397 ASIC chip, also found in commercial miners. The device runs fully autonomously without a connected computer and can be configured and monitored through a built-in web interface.

Hashrate, Efficiency, and Probability

A typical Bitaxe 601 Gamma delivers around 1.3 TH/s at 15 to 20 watts – which equals roughly 15 watts per terahash. That makes it one of the most efficient miners in its class. By comparison, an industrial-grade Antminer S19 uses around 25–30 watts per TH, though with far greater total output.

For those who enjoy tinkering, the Bitaxe offers plenty of room for optimization: from overclocking to improved cooling setups. With bigger heatsinks, better airflow, or even active cooling, performance can be pushed beyond standard specs.

Still, with 1.3 TH/s, a Bitaxe represents only a tiny fraction of the global hashrate – around 840 EH/s in June 2025. That leads to the following probabilities of finding a block:

Per block (every 10 minutes): ~1 in 461 million
Per day (144 blocks): ~1 in 3.2 million
Per month (4,320 blocks): ~1 in 107,000 In other words: if you run a Bitaxe continuously for 30 days, your chance of mining a valid block is just 0.00094% (or less than 1 in 100,000). Over a year, the chance increases to 0.0114% – or roughly 1 in 8,800.

Realistically, you’re unlikely to find a block with a single Bitaxe – unless you’re incredibly lucky.

But still: it has happened.

Against all statistical expectations, two confirmed blocks have already been mined by Bitaxe devices:

July 24, 2024 – Block 853742
March 10, 2025 – Block 887212 These rare events prove that improbable does not mean impossible. And that’s exactly the magic of it: Bitaxe has shown that even a single open-source home miner can win against industrial-scale farms.

For most users, Bitaxe isn’t about profit. It’s about learning – and supporting decentralization on the most fundamental level of the Bitcoin network.

Decentralizing Mining

Despite the extremely low odds for each device, Bitaxes can have real impact as a collective force. Statistically, around 4.5 million Bitaxe units would need to run worldwide to mine one block per day. But with just 150,000 active devices, a monthly block would already be statistically realistic.

The Bitaxe project puts hashrate back into the hands of many – rather than leaving it concentrated in the hands of a few.

Final Thoughts

Bitaxe is an open source mining project
It was started to fight mining centralisation
A single Bitaxe has only ~0.00094% chance of mining a block per month – yet it has already happened twice.