Its just a lotto ticket 🎟
Discussion
💯 A $300 fun and educational lotto ticket. A decentralized fleet of BitAxes will not overtake industrial mining operations (industrial-scale ASIC miners can produce hundreds or thousands of TH/s). Even if you gathered an army of 50,000 BitAxes (that's $15 million worth!), each producing 1.6 TH/s, you'd only reach about 80,000 TH/s combined.
A single warehouse of industrial miners can dwarf that entire fleet. And dreaming bigger with a million BitAxes? That's $300 million spent to achieve what a few racks of industrial ASICs can do.
It sounds like a good fight for a good cause, and it's a fun hobby project if you'd rather not save for a proper miner or stack more sats.
The harsh reality is that while buyers gamble on hitting a block with their 22W miners, the sellers marketing that distant hope are the ones consistently profiting from the $300 price tags.
In the Bitaxe circles I’ve been hanging around I don’t hear much about overtaking industrial mining. Mostly it’s engineers and coders and nerds and the curious. Yes a hobby, people who are interested in the science and technology, who like to tinker, mod the cooling and overclocking, look at the stats in the dashboard. Meanwhile doing it’s part to decentralize the network to whatever extent it can. Lots of people have and spend $300, $400, $500 or more on their hobbies. Definitely more for things like fishing, photography, Lego, golf (frisbee or regular) etc. and most of us can’t do proper mining due to the cost of electricity, and the space needed for the noise and heat of it. I get that some resellers may be marketing it differently, I’m just trying to express the non-markety side of it.
Understood. This particular brand frequently uses this talking point in their marketing, along with leading statements and reframed statistics (like the ones I put into proper perspective in my reply), to suggest these devices will regularly hit blocks when enough people buy them. If you look at their marketing materials, you'll see what I mean. Here is an example:
I agrre the marketing is a touch hopeful, but I think democratizing hash is a worthy cause. It is important that we create an alternative mining supply in such case significant intervention by governments should occur against existing scale commercial miners. The J/TH on the gammas are comparable to the 200+ TH models BitMains and don't require 220V power.
The open source BitAxe project is creating an economy for small scale decentralized miners and helps to drive the cost down on small format single or few chip miners. Open source designs will also allow hash to flow into home heating devices. This is good for the network, good for the world.
If you have stranded or cheap power you can participate and earn non-KYC freedom money.
Exactly. Hard to hit a block solo mining. ⛏️
It’s a fun toy. I want one.
It'll probably never happen. But how cool is it to have a little miner you can have on a desk?
I agree. They are cool little devices. It's the misleading marketing of this particular brand that I am responding to.
It's not necessary to reframe statistics (like the ones I put into proper perspective in my reply), use leading language to suggest these devices will regularly hit blocks when enough people buy them, or try to convince people this is the "last stand against centralized hash power."
People will buy them, and buy them with the proper context and expectations. There is no need for embellishment. It's not a good look.
It would take so many of the solo miners to hit a block going up against ant pool alone… 🙄