Four tiny ASIC miners on a shelf in my office pull roughly 105W combined — about the same as a mid-sized laptop — and produce 6.59 TH/s of Bitcoin hash rate. The odds of finding a block this year: roughly 1 in 120 million per day. I still do it. Here's why.
A Bitaxe is an open-source Bitcoin miner built around a single Bitmain BM1368 chip — the same ASIC inside commercial Antminer S19XP rigs, just one of it instead of 240. Each Bitaxe costs about $80, runs at ~1.7 TH/s, and pulls ~25W. Firmware is ESP-Miner, open source, web-based UI. You buy the PCB, plug it into any 5.1V USB-C power brick, connect to Wi-Fi through the little web server, and point it at a mining pool.
It's the cheapest way to own a real ASIC miner. Not a toy, not emulated — a genuine Bitcoin miner small enough to fit in your hand.
Four Bitaxe Gamma Duo units (the two-chip variant), stacked on a shelf. Total: ~6.59 TH/s at ~105W. Hardware cost: ~$320. Electricity at $0.12/kWh: about $15/month. A single small USB-C hub powers them. A USB desk fan keeps temperatures under 60ยฐC. Total bench space: slightly larger than a paperback book.
Most miners join a pool: thousands of participants combine hash rate, share the rewards proportionally when any pool member finds a block. Predictable, small payouts.
I solo mine through solo.ckpool.org — a thin relay service run by Con Kolivas that lets individual miners submit blocks without joining a traditional pool. If one of my Bitaxes finds a block, I get the full 3.125 BTC subsidy plus transaction fees. If none of them do (the likely outcome), I get zero. No splitting, no gambling on variance reduction — pure probability.
Global Bitcoin hash rate: ~800 EH/s (800 quintillion hashes/second) as of early 2026.
My contribution: 6.59 TH/s = 0.0000008% of network hash.
Blocks found per day globally: ~144 (one every ~10 minutes).
My expected blocks per day: 144 × 0.0000008% = ~0.000001152 blocks.
That's roughly 1 in 870,000 days, or roughly 1 in 2,380 years, on average.
Per day specifically, the odds of finding at least one block are roughly 1 in 120 million. In practice: I will almost certainly never find a block with this hash rate. Expected value: negative.
For education and the lottery thrill: yes, absolutely. For the price of a nice dinner you own a real ASIC, learn how Bitcoin's proof-of-work actually functions, and contribute to network decentralization.
For profit: absolutely not. If you want mining profits at small scale, the math is unambiguous — take the $320 hardware budget and the $15/month electricity and DCA it into spot Bitcoin. You'll end up with more Bitcoin. The only reasons to run a Bitaxe are non-financial.
Published April 1, 2026. Not financial advice.