Company Name: Bitaxe
Founders: shot
Founding date: Early 2023
Headquarters Location: North Carolina + remote team
Amount of bitcoin held in Treasury: N/A
Number of employees: ~12 regular collaborators
Website: https://bitaxe.org/
Public or Private? Open source project (not a company)
BitaxeThe founder of, who goes by Skot, took his hobby of tinkering with electronics and not only turned it into a full-time job, but has also catalyzed thousands of people to follow suit.
Drawing on his background as an electrical engineer and his enthusiasm for bitcoin, Skot began deconstructing Bitmain's bitcoin mining machines about two years ago. After better understanding how they work, he reverse engineered one and created the model for Bitaxe, the first open source software. asicobitcoin mining machine based on bitcoin, early 2023.
“At first it was just a technical challenge,” Skot told bitcoin Magazine.
However, that technical challenge has transformed into something bigger than I ever imagined. Skot created an affordable, low-power bitcoin miner that anyone can plug in at home without running up a huge energy bill, while his work also paved the way for others interested in bare-code bitcoin mining. open source will begin contributing to Bitaxe and other open source bitcoin mining platforms. Origin mining initiatives like this (and related to it).
“The project has morphed into something that is bringing mining back to the open source fundamentals of bitcoin itself,” Skot said.
“I'm really convinced that to be truly decentralized, which I think most people understand bitcoin needs to be, all aspects of bitcoin development need to be open source,” he added.
“It needs to be open so anyone who is even remotely interested can come in.”
The journey from Skot to Bitaxe
Years ago, while taking liberal arts courses at a community college, Skot stumbled upon a question of make magazinea publication featuring tutorials for DIY electronics projects. A switch flipped inside him as he scanned the magazine.
He completed a bachelor's degree as an electrical engineer and then co-founded a design consultancy for Internet of Things (IOT)-related products, which he ran for 10 years. Skot enjoyed the work, but admitted the downside was that he was constantly working on other people's ideas.
In 2011, a friend introduced him to bitcoin at a party and showed him how to use it to buy drugs in the now-defunct Silk Road. While I was intrigued, it wasn't enough to make me buy bitcoins (or drugs) at the time.
Two years later, Skot learned about bitcoin mining and, shortly after, built his first bitcoin miner.
“In fact, I built a bitcoin-Miner”>FPGA bitcoin Miner”Skot recalled. “FPGAs were the precursors of ASICs.”
The FPGA miners were designed with open source code, which made it easy for Skot to figure out how to build one.
Although he lost all the bitcoins he mined in a group hack, he was not discouraged. In fact, he became increasingly fascinated with this cross-section of electronics and the permissionless nature of bitcoin.
“When I was learning about this, I thought, 'Well, okay, these are the rules of how bitcoin mining works, but who made these rules?' Who enforces these rules?'” Skot said.
“Learning that no one is at the center of this and that no one is enforcing these rules (or we all are) was mind-blowing. “It is something technically beautiful and that intrigued me,” he added.
A few years later, he dove deeper and developed the Bitaxe.
What is Bitaxe?
A Bitaxe is technically just open source code that anyone can use to build a physical mining machine.
Skot has only built about a dozen Bitaxes, while thousands have been built and sold. Anyone can create and sell Bitaxe under its open source license.
The circuit board of the physical Bitaxes is not much larger than a credit card, while the device's fan protrudes about 3 cm from the board. (There are different versions of Bitaxes that vary slightly in size.)
The machine runs on a 5-volt power supply and connects to the Internet via WiFi. Users interact with Bitaxes through their personal computer or phone. The devices consume between 12 and 18 watts of electricity, which is comparable to an iPad charger.
Running a Bitaxe full-time should only increase users' energy bills by a few dollars per month (this varies by jurisdiction), and costs less than it costs to run a bitcoin node.
The odds of finding a block with a Bitaxe are infinitely low (although, a Bitaxe found a block last July), but users can direct the hash power they produce with their Bitaxe to almost any mining pool for smaller payouts.
Ideally, Bitaxes are used to decentralize the hashrate, although this will, in the end, only lead to truly meaningful decentralization if the centralization of the mining pool decreases along with it.
“My hope is that by decentralizing the number of brains that operate these things, enough people will make different decisions,” Skot explained. “If we can exponentially increase the number of different brains and all the crazy ways they think, I think they will choose different groups.”
Incorporating more of these brains was part of Skot's motivation for creating Bitaxe (which I'll talk more about in a moment), while another part of his motivation was simply to bring a new type of bitcoin mining machine to market.
Bitaxe vs. Industrial bitcoin Miners
Most bitcoin mining rigs are designed for major players in the industry.
“99.9% of the bitcoin mining hardware out there is designed specifically to be used in a grid-connected data center,” Skot said. “They are all designed to connect to the grid and run at full power 24/7 on industrial power.”
Skot explained that while this is great for industrial miners who tend to point their hash power at large mining pools, it does very little for bitcoin enthusiasts who want to contribute to the hashrate.
He also shared that ASIC chips are not currently sold independently of Bitmain miners and that it is difficult to understand how the chips work, because the machines they operate on are designed with closed source code.
“Right now we basically have only one chipmaker: it's Bitmain,” Skot said.
“They are way ahead of the rest, but I don't think that advantage will last forever. “I think some of these other chip makers will emerge,” he added.
While Skot patiently waits for the ASIC chip being developed by Jack Dorsey's Block, which will be able to be used in any mining device, he continues to work on open-sourcing the bitcoin mining stack to make it easier to compete in the ASIC market. .
“Let's open up as much of that stack as we can, because, as we saw with the Internet, random people can make interesting things in their garages that sometimes become a market standard,” Skot said.
And he should know, as he created a new standard in bitcoin mining in his figurative garage with Bitaxe just over a year and a half ago, which has led to many others following suit.
“I've been doing it for about a year and a half and it's growing exponentially,” Skot said. “My goal is to maintain this exponential growth.”
The open source mining movement
After bitcoin-grants-feb-2024″>receiving a grant from OpenSats Earlier this year, Skot was able to focus full time on Bitaxe and the community that formed around the project.
“When I started this, I met a random person in bitcoin Talk who said: 'I'm going to start a Discord group and it's going to be called Open Source Miners United; you should come see it,'” Skot explained.
start this discord group The gentleman did, and now has over 4,000 members, all of whom share ideas on how to promote Bitaxe and the broader open source mining movement. But Open Source Miners United (OSMU) It has become even bigger than just a group where people share ideas.
“It has been created so that anyone who wants to contribute to the Bitaxe project can do so, whether it is a random person who wants to donate or the Bitaxe manufacturers who contribute to the project,” Skot explained.
“OSMU has this fund, this treasury that is now growing because we are selling a lot of Bitaxes and providing small grants to other people working in open source mining,” he added.
Skot also shared that for every Bitaxe sold, approximately $5 is donated to OSMU, helping to financially support himself and OSMU grant recipients. (In a follow-up email he stressed that this practice is entirely optional and that he greatly appreciates manufacturers who choose to do this.)
The Future of Bitaxe and Open Source bitcoin Mining
According to Skot, the Bitaxe and open source mining movement has taken on a life of its own. That is, Skot no longer necessarily feels like he is in the center: he has become decentralized. And while he's excited about the pace at which the movement is growing, he's still steadfast and focused on his mission.
He hasn't created a roadmap for what's next for Bitaxe and the community he helped found, although he's pretty sure what the goal of his work is.
“I've been very intrigued and motivated to promote this idea that bitcoin is fundamentally open source,” Skot said.
“This decentralized network must be developed in a decentralized way. We can't have one without the other. That's why I think this part of open source is very important,” he added.
“bitcoin mining has somehow completely forgotten about the open source spirit of bitcoin and how important open source development is. We have to get this back.”
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