Bitcoin is hard money, and it’s becoming increasingly hard over time as the Bitcoin mining network grows. But just because it’s difficult doesn’t mean there aren’t fun ways you can get involved!
What Is Bitcoin Lottery Mining?
Bitcoin lottery mining is a way for the everyday person to get involved with Bitcoin mining, no matter how little power they have personally available to devote to it. With lottery mining, you can participate in the chance of mining a solo block of bitcoin without having to rack up a huge electricity bill or spend a ton of money upfront on Bitcoin miners.
Bitcoin lottery miners are small desktop devices that you can connect to your everyday computer and run. It leverages the computing power you already have available at home to enter the mining pool, giving you a small (but not impossible) chance of mining a solo block – which currently pays out 3.125 BTC based on the 2024 block reward!
Understanding The Bitaxe Miner
The most popular way for people to try Bitcoin lottery mining is with the Bitaxe.
Bitaxe is a compact, DIY miner device that sits on your desk and passively mines bitcoin. With very little setup involved, you can test your luck at the Bitcoin mining lottery. Thanks to its small design, its relative draw on your power consumption will be a much lower cost compared to a traditional full-sized Bitcoin miner. However, the lower power consumption also means that your chances of mining a block are significantly lower, hence why the Bitaxe is considered a “lottery miner.”
You shouldn’t purchase a Bitaxe expecting to become a significant competitor in the mining space. At best, you can get very lucky and score a massively outsized reward relative to the initial investment. However, the focus of the Bitaxe shouldn’t be placed on the potential earnings you can make from it. It’s better framed as a fun and engaging piece of hardware to learn and interact with the Bitcoin network.
How Hard Is It To Solo Mine A Bitcoin Block With A Bitaxe?
While the Bitaxe is capable of mining an entire block all on its own, the chances that your Bitaxe will be the mining device – out of hundreds of thousands of miners worldwide – to mine the next Bitcoin block are infinitesimally small.
The good news is that you can increase your odds of success depending on the Bitaxe model you purchase. There are four available, each of which output greater levels of hashpower:
- Bitaxe Max (100 series) – BM1397 ASIC chip
- Bitaxe Ultra (200 series) – BM1366 ASIC chip
- Bitaxe Supra (400 series) – BM1368 ASIC chip
- Bitaxe Gamma (600 series) – BM1370 ASIC chip
So how difficult is it to solo mine a Bitcoin block with each Bitaxe model? To determine your probability (P) of finding the next block, you need to divide your specific miner hashrate by the overall network hashrate. Here’s what the equation looks like:
Let’s break the numbers down.
- The Bitaxe Max outputs 400-450 GH/s (gigahashes/second). With a current network hashrate of 800 EH/s, your probability of mining a block with the Bitaxe Max model is 0.0000000531%.
- The Bitaxe Ultra outputs 500-550 GH/s. With a current network hashrate of 800 EH/s, your probability of mining a block with the Bitaxe Max model is 0.0000000656%.
- The Bitaxe Supra outputs 600-700 GH/s. With a current network hashrate of 800 EH/s, your probability of mining a block with the Bitaxe Max model is 0.0000000813%.
- The Bitaxe Gamma outputs 1.0-1.2 TH/s (terahashes/second). With a current network hashrate of 800 EH/s, your probability of mining a block with the Bitaxe Max model is 0.0000001375%.
For reference, the odds of winning the actual Powerball Lottery are about 0.000000333%. There are a lot of zeros here, but to put that into perspective, these odds make you ~2.4x more likely to win the Powerball than solo mining a block with the most powerful Bitaxe model. As you can clearly see, your expectations of successfully solo mining a block should be quite low. However, just because you most likely won’t see a real return on your investment in a Bitaxe doesn’t mean that it’s a waste of time or money! For bitcoiners at any stage in their journey – whether you’re brand new to the space or a seasoned veteran who’s held through multiple boom-bust cycles – the Bitaxe serves as a great opportunity to get hands on with bitcoin, while enjoying the off-chance that your curiosity will be greatly rewarded one day.
Get Started With Bitaxe
Setting up a Bitaxe is relatively straightforward. After purchasing your device, setting up is a simple 7 step process:
- Attach the display to Bitaxe’s printed circuit board (PCB).
- Power the Bitaxe using the included power supply.
- Connect your Bitaxe to your local WiFi network by using your internet-connected device to search for a “Bitaxe_XXXX” WiFi access point.
- After connecting, you should be redirected to the AxeOS portal. Alternatively, visit http://192.168.4.1 to access the configuration page. Once there, click “settings”.
- Set your SSID and password for your local WiFi network. Be sure to save it somewhere in case you need to reconfigure in the future.
- Update the pool URL, port and user to your preferred pool. There are many pool options available, but ckpool or publicpool are good options for solo mining.
- Save your settings, then restart to apply changes!
Assuming a proper setup, your Bitaxe should start mining!
Will Bitcoin Mining Ever Get Easier?
Don’t let the low odds of solo mining a Bitcoin block discourage you from Bitaxe if it’s a product you’re genuinely interested in. Unfortunately for the solo miner (but fortunately for the network), Bitcoin mining will never get easier and will only increase in difficulty as time passes and the halving continues to reduce the block size reward.
If you take a look at the Bitcoin supply schedule, you’ll notice that every four years, the mining reward drops by half as part of bitcoin’s programmed disinflation. At the same time, Bitcoin mining becomes more difficult as more miners start participating, which raises total network hashpower, forcing Satoshi Nakamoto’s ingenious protocol to automatically adjust the difficulty to account for the increase in energy being directly towards Bitcoin mining.
That’s the beauty of bitcoin’s difficulty adjustment. It’s a mechanism that ensures how hard bitcoin is to mine is based on maintaining 10-minute mining intervals. So instead of requiring manual, human intervention to set rates on the hardness of our money, like our Federal Reserve does with interest rates today, the difficulty adjustment ensures that no matter how little or many people are trying to mine bitcoin, the protocol will maintain a ~10-minute threshold (on average) of computational effort before letting a random miner secure the block reward. This takes the human hands out of bitcoin and actually forces the hands of people around the world to adapt to Bitcoin’s network rules, instead of trying to create them ourselves.
Mining gold is only as hard as it is to locate, so as our technology, capabilities, and processes become more efficient, gold becomes easier to mine over time. In other words, gold’s “hardness” is determined physically, by its location in space. Bitcoin is a breakthrough in money because Satoshi used the difficulty adjustment to determine bitcoin’s hardness in time, rather than in space. No matter how much more powerful our computers become, it will always require the same amount of time to mine bitcoin.
How Else Can You Acquire Bitcoin?
For the everyday person, mining bitcoin is not the most efficient way to earn bitcoin. Since mining is only getting harder with each passing year, solo mining becomes increasingly difficult to manage, making Bitcoin lottery mining a fun alternative to include alongside your other stacking efforts.
Those other stacking efforts should first come from the fruits of your labor. There’s no better way to preserve the time and energy you spend at your daily job than by storing it in bitcoin for the long haul. Whatever savings rate you can afford for your personal situation, bitcoin is proving itself to be the best vehicle in history to secure those savings and ensure you get the most out of them. As is becoming evident with gold mining, the historic “gold standard” of savings is evolving beyond physical gold to digital gold. Framing your labor in the context of this new emerging reality is the best way to get the most out of your long-term savings.
Besides pure saving in bitcoin, all new kinds of novel methods for acquiring bitcoin exist online. The Lightning network opens up new possibilities to stack sats through online games, social media, web extensions, and more. You can use these innovations to incorporate passive sat stacking into your everyday online activity. If you like social media, consider getting on Nostr or Stacker News to earn sats for your posts instead of likes. If you like mobile games, there are tons of Bitcoin-based games on your phone’s app store that offer small sat payouts for playing. If you’re annoyed with constantly seeing ads as you navigate the web, install the Slice web extension to redirect the ad revenue going to advertisers’ pockets to your own in the form of bitcoin. All of these methods and more are possible thanks to Bitcoin developers around the world working to spread financial sovereignty as far and wide as possible.
If you’re a business owner, consider accepting bitcoin for payment! This option is especially powerful if you run an e-commerce business. As bitcoin becomes more widespread and the preferred choice for online payment, accepting bitcoin not only helps you acquire it for yourself, but also gives you leverage to broadcast your business as a part of the Bitcoin movement. It’s a great way to market your business to a brand new audience that takes pleasure in spending bitcoin whenever they get the chance.
You can earn sats back on your everyday purchases by adopting Bitcoin rewards apps like Fold (affiliate). Fold is a Bitcoin-back debit card that enables you to earn sats for buying groceries or gift cards, paying off bills, or any other expense that you’d normally use a credit/debit card for. Tools like Fold truly bring you one step closer to a fully-hyperbitcoinized world. While society gradually transitions to a Bitcoin standard, you can use Fold to start living that standard today and get ahead of those waiting for the future to come to them.
As the years go on, bitcoin is enabling all new kinds of ways to earn money that you can rely on for the future. Stacking bitcoin makes all the difference for your financial future. While the payouts for mobile gaming, for example, might be small, they could prove to be infinitely more valuable than if your time had been spent earning fiat currency that’s being devalued with each passing day. A few cents here and there each day can add up to become a significant chunk of change as bitcoin redefines our monetary system. While nothing is guaranteed, the low-lift changes you can make today to acquire bitcoin is well worth the small effort.
Final Thoughts
Bitcoin lottery mining with devices like Bitaxe are a prime example of the world of opportunity bitcoin presents us with. No matter where you’re located geographically, with an internet connection and a computer or mobile device, you can access a brand new monetary network that’s eating away at the legacy system day by day. Billions of people unfortunately have no access to today’s modern banking networks, but a large majority of those billions thankfully have access to the basic devices necessary to interact with bitcoin. Even a simple text message, without any internet at all, is capable of delivering bitcoin to a person.
Start doing what you can today to take advantage of these opportunities, and if you choose to start lottery mining with Bitaxe on top of those efforts, you may wake up one day to a nice bonus for your efforts to pioneer a new financial future.
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