Bitaxe And The Open-Source Bitcoin Mining Movement

Company Name: Betax

Founders: shot

Establishment date: Early 2023

Headquarters location: North Carolina + remote team

The amount of Bitcoin held in the vault: nothing

Number of employees: ~12 regular contributors

Website: https://bitaxe.org/

Public or private? Open source project (not company)

BetaxThe company’s founder, who goes by the name Skot, took his electronics repair hobby and not only turned it into a full-time business, but motivated thousands to do the same.

Harnessing his training as an electrical engineer and enthusiasm for Bitcoin, Scott began disassembling Bitmain’s Bitcoin mining machines about two years ago. After gaining a better understanding of how it worked, he reverse-engineered it, creating the blueprint for Bitaxe – the first ever open source ASICBitcoin-based Bitcoin mining machine – early 2023.

“It was just a technical challenge at first,” Scott told Bitcoin Magazine.

This technical challenge has turned into something bigger than he ever imagined. Scott has created an affordable, low-power Bitcoin mining rig that anyone can plug into at home without paying a huge energy bill, while his work has also paved the way for others interested in open source Bitcoin mining to start contributing to Bitaxe and other open source currencies. Source mining initiatives such as (and related).

“The project has turned into something that brings mining back to the open source fundamentals of Bitcoin itself,” Scott said.

“I’ve become really convinced that in order to be truly decentralized, which I think most people understand Bitcoin should be, all aspects of Bitcoin development have to be open source,” he added.

“It should be open so anyone even remotely interested can enter.”

Scott’s trip to Bitaxe

Years ago, while taking liberal arts courses at a community college, Scott stumbled upon a liberal arts issue Make a journala publication containing tutorials for DIY electronics projects. The switch flipped inside him as he leafed through the magazine.

He earned a degree as an electrical engineer and then co-founded a consulting company to design products related to the Internet of Things (IOT), which he ran for 10 years. Scott 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, showing him how to use Bitcoin to buy drugs on the now-defunct currency. Silk Road. While he was intrigued, it wasn’t enough to get him to buy Bitcoin (or drugs) at the time.

Two years later, Scott learned about Bitcoin mining, and soon after, he built his first Bitcoin mine.

“I’ve already built it FPGA Bitcoin Mining“FPGAs were the precursor to ASICs,” Scott recalls.

The FPGA miners are built using open source code, making it easy for Skot to figure out how to build one.

Even though he lost all the bitcoins he mined in a pool hack, he was not discouraged. In fact, he became more fascinated by this cross-section of electronics and the permissionless nature of Bitcoin.

“When I was learning about it, I said, ‘Okay, well, these are the rules for how Bitcoin mining works, but who makes these rules? Who enforces these rules?'” Scott recounted.

“Knowing that no one is at the center of this and no one is enforcing these rules – or we all do – was amazing. “It’s an artistically beautiful thing, and it piqued my interest,” he added.

After a few years, he delved into Bitaxe development.

What is Betax?

Bitaxe is technically just open source code that anyone can use to build an actual mining machine.

bitaxeGamma is gone! Newest member of #BETAX The kit features the BM1370 ASIC from the Antminer S21 Pro. So far we have been able to pull 1 – 1.2 TBH/s at around 15 J/TBH from a single chip 🤯

We have #Bitcoin Global Freedom’s money is to be secured here, so everything is open… pic.twitter.com/cxWC70ETy

-Scott (@skot9000) August 19, 2024

Scott only built about a dozen Bitaxes himself, while thousands were built and sold. Anyone can create and sell Bitaxe under its open source license.

The circuit board for the actual Bitaxes isn’t much larger than a credit card, while the device’s fan protrudes about 3cm from the board. (There are different versions of Bitaxes that vary slightly in size.)

The device runs on a 5V power supply and connects to the Internet via WiFi. Users interact with Bitaxes via their PCs or phones. The devices use between 12 and 18 watts of electricity, which is equivalent to an iPad charger.

Running Bitaxe full-time should increase users’ energy bills by only a few dollars per month (this varies by jurisdiction), and costs less than the costs of running a Bitcoin node.

The odds of finding a block using Bitaxe are very low (however, Bitaxe has found a block last July), but users can direct the hash power they generate with Bitaxe to almost any mining pool for lower payouts.

Ideally, Bitaxes are used to decentralize the hash rate, although this will only ultimately lead to truly meaningful decentralization if the centralization of the mining pool declines with it.

“I hope that by decentralizing the number of minds running these things, enough people will be able to make different decisions,” Scott explained. “If we could dramatically increase the number of different brains and all the crazy ways they think, I think they would choose different combinations.”

Bringing in more of these minds was part of Scott’s motivation for creating Bitaxe (which I’ll get to more in a bit), while another part of his motivation was simply to bring a new type of Bitcoin mining machine to the market.

Bitaxe vs. Industrial Bitcoin Miners

Most Bitcoin mining equipment is designed for major players in the industry.

“99.9% of the Bitcoin mining hardware out there is specifically designed for use in a networked data center,” Scott said. “They are all designed to be connected to the grid and run at full capacity 24/7 using industrial power.”

While this is great for industrial miners who tend to funnel their hashing power to large mining pools, it does very little for Bitcoin enthusiasts who want to contribute to the hash rate, Scott explained.

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 hardware they run in is designed with closed source code.

“We basically only have one chip maker right now, which is Bitmain,” Scott said.

“They are far ahead of the pack, but I don’t think the advantage they have will last forever. I think some other chip makers will emerge,” he added.

While Scott is eagerly awaiting Jack Dorsey’s Block ASIC chip, which will be able to be used in any mining rig, he continues to work on open source the Bitcoin mining stack so that it will be easier to compete in the ASIC market.

“Let’s open up as much of this set of sources as we can, because, as we’ve seen with the Internet, random people can do cool things in their garage that sometimes turn into a market standard,” Scott said.

And he should know, because he created a new standard in Bitcoin mining in his token garage with Bitaxe just over a year and a half ago, leading many others to follow suit.

“I’ve been doing this for about a year and a half, and it’s growing exponentially,” Scott said. “My goal is to maintain this exponential growth.”

Open source mining movement

after Receive a grant from OpenSats Early this year, Skot was able to focus full-time on Bitaxe and the community that had formed around the project.

“When I first started this, I met a random guy 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 check it out,” Scott explained.

Start this Discord group The guy did just that, and it now has over 4,000 members, all sharing ideas on how to advance Bitaxe and the broader open source mining movement. but Open Source Miners Union (OSMU) It has become more than just a group where people share ideas.

“It’s set up so that anyone who wants to contribute to the Bitaxe project can do so, whether it’s a random person who wants to donate or the Bitaxe manufacturers who contribute to the project,” Scott explained.

“OSMU has this fund, and this treasury is growing now because we sell a lot of Bitaxes, and we give 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, which helps financially support himself and OSMU grant recipients. (He emphasized in a follow-up email that this practice is completely optional and that he greatly appreciates manufacturers who choose to do so.)

Bitaxe future and open source bitcoin mining

The Bitaxe and open source mining movement has taken on a life of its own, according to Scott. This means that Scott doesn’t necessarily feel like he’s at the center of it anymore – he’s decentralized. Although he is excited about the pace at which the movement is growing, he remains grounded and focused on the mission.

He hasn’t created a roadmap for what comes next for Bitaxe and the community he helped found, even though he’s pretty sure about the purpose of his work.

“I was very interested and excited to promote this idea that Bitcoin is fundamentally open source,” Scott said.

“This decentralized network needs to be developed in a decentralized way. We can’t have one without the other. So, I think this open source part is very important,” he added.

“Bitcoin mining has somehow completely forgotten the open source spirit of Bitcoin and how important open source development is. We have to bring this back.”