Is a Bitaxe profitable?

I get asked this a lot, and I understand why - there's a shelf of solo miners in this house, so I look like a man who's done the sums and found something. The answer is no. A Bitaxe will not pay your bills, or your rent, or for itself, and everything on my shelf put together has earned me, in payouts, nothing at all. I've done the sums. I keep buying miners anyway. Both of those things are true and this article is me trying to explain how.

The short answer

Point a Bitaxe at a solo pool and you've bought a lottery ticket that pays out roughly never, but when it does, pays a whole block - currently 3.125 BTC plus fees. Point it at a normal pool instead and you'll earn a steady, real, and frankly pointless fraction of a penny a day. Either way the electricity is pennies, which is the one bit of the maths that lands in your favour. As income, then, no. But income was never what I was buying, and I'll come back to that.

The maths, solo

The sum itself is short. A Gamma does about 1.2 terahash. The whole Bitcoin network is doing over nine hundred exahash as I write this. Your share of the next block is your hashrate divided by the network's, and that division produces a number with a frightening quantity of zeros in front of it. On average, a single Gamma finds a block on the order of once every thirteen thousand years. The figure above is live, so it'll drift with the network, but it will always be a number of that shape.

Averages aren't the whole story, though, and this is where it gets more interesting than it should be. People solo mining on a single Bitaxe really have struck blocks - a handful every year, verifiable on-chain, and I read every one of those stories when they surface. Your expected value is a fraction of a penny a day. Your actual outcome is almost certainly zero, with a vanishingly small chance of a life-changing sum. I know which side of that my fleet has landed on so far.

The maths, pooled

Point the same Bitaxe at an ordinary pool and the shape flips: you get your share of the pool's combined luck, steadily and predictably, in amounts too small to be worth the words. A terahash against a network this size earns a fraction of a penny a day. Technically that's above zero. It also throws away the lottery, which in my view is the one interesting thing about the machine, so I've never run mine that way for more than a test. You might weigh that differently - some people would rather watch a small number tick up than a zero sit still, and I can't tell you they're wrong.

Why I keep buying them

This is the part I find harder to write down convincingly, because the reasons don't survive being turned into a list very well. But roughly:

• The education was real. Setting up my first solo miner taught me more about how mining, pools, difficulty and the network fit together than years of reading about it had. That knowledge is most of why this site exists.
• The flutter is real too. Tiny odds, enormous prize, and I still glance at the dashboard most mornings. For the electricity of a lightbulb, that's cheaper than most habits I could name.
• Heat and sovereignty, in small amounts. A few watts of warmth on the desk, and if you point it at your own node, you're a participant in the network rather than a spectator. How much that's worth is a personal question; to me, something.

What I still can't fully account for is why the checking never gets old. The rational part of me knows the odds haven't changed overnight. I look anyway. If the appeal I've described sounds like your sort of thing, run your own numbers through the lottery-odds calculator before you spend anything, then the setup guide will get you hashing - just go in expecting the education and the flutter, not the payout.