My little Bitaxe has roughly a 1 in 5 million chance of finding a block on any given day.

Run it every day for a year and the odds improve to about 1 in 15,000, which means I should expect to hit a block sometime around the year 17,000. Not exactly a retirement plan.

But that misses why people care about solo mining in the first place.

A Bitaxe is a tiny open-source bitcoin miner that fits in your hand, runs on about as much power as a bright LED bulb, and gives you a physical connection to a network that usually feels abstract. You plug it in, point it at the network, and watch it try to solve the same puzzle as the industrial miners running entire warehouses.

The expected return is awful. The educational return is pretty good.

For my daughter, it was a Saturday project with wires, a little screen, and questions about hashes per second. For me, it was a simple way to show that bitcoin mining isn't magic and isn't reserved only for giant companies with cheap power contracts.

Anyone with a miner and a power source can participate. You can mine through a pool for steady sats, or you can solo mine and take the absurd long-shot bet. Either way, the door is still open.

That permissionless quality is easy to underappreciate until you see it humming on your desk.

Read the full piece: https://firebtc.io/p/hashrate-hopium