When I first came onto the Bitcoin scene in 2017, I had changed my Twitter (now X) handle to “@nikcantmine.” (It was a joke I thought was funny at the time since I didn’t have the resources to mine BTC in high school.) But today, I officially became “nik CAN mine”.

The other week I got gifted a Bitaxe, a fully open source (and very small) bitcoin miner, while attending the Human Rights Foundation’s Bitcoin Summit in Nashville. It’s a pretty neat device that allows you to connect to a mining pool or solo mine on your own.

nik CAN mine pic.twitter.com/Mv1OuTyvBM

— Nikolaus (@nikcantmine) October 8, 2024

Setting up the device was fairly easy. Tinkering with it was fun and having the ability to hold a miner in the palm of my hand felt pretty cypherpunk. It feels like a cool way to introduce someone to mining on a very small scale.

Of course, by connecting this miner to a pool, I wouldn’t stand to gain any real profit, as this miner is negligible compared to what power is actually needed today to profitably mine BTC today. But solo mining with this machine is where things get a bit interesting.

Earlier this summer, a Bitaxe solo miner actually beat the odds and mined a solo block, earning the block reward of 3.25 BTC currently worth over $205,000.

Congratulations to miner with the first bitaxe block, only a tiny 3TH for finding the 290th solo block on solo ckpool! This much hashrate only would find a block once every 3500 YEARS on average, or 1 in 1.2 MILLION chance per day! https://t.co/5Wtu9jydsF pic.twitter.com/D5sSzug42P

— Dr -ck (@ckpooldev) July 24, 2024

Data shows this miner had mined consistently with 500Gh/s worth of hashrate for weeks, and then had increased its hashrate up to 3TH right before the block was found. Which somewhat encourages me knowing that my Bitaxe is currently mining at over 634Gh/s.

But I’m not getting my hopes up, considering I don’t have more hashrate to add and the odds of finding a block with this little hash rate is around 1 in 1.2 million per day, according to the Solo Ckpool admin, Dr -ck. 

Still, I got this machine for free, so I thought why not plug it in and see what happens? I’ll deal with the power bill later when I see how much it is, and re-evaluate if this is worth it to keep running. Having used it, I probably wouldn’t purchase one based on the economics of it alone, since I wouldn’t be able to make my money back unless I hit the lottery. But I would maybe purchase one just to have as a fun toy.

The odds of me finding a block is 0.001% per day, but it honestly just feels fun to have running in hopes of finding a solo block. I can keep my Bitaxe running 24/7 if I want to, since it only requires a 5-volt power cord plugged into a normal electrical socket to operate. I’ve got it set up right here on my desk next to my monitor.

Together with a new Coldcard Q I just got, I couldn’t stop thinking about how cool it would be to win a solo block mining with this and have that BTC reward sent to a brand new bitcoin wallet.

This would mean there is no public record of me receiving either the Bitaxe or Coldcard (apart from this article), and I’d have some sweet KYC-free Bitcoin. 

This article is a Take. Opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.