Bitaxe And The Open-Source Bitcoin Mining Movement

Company Name: Bitaxe

Founders: Skot

Date Founded: Early 2023

Location of Headquarters: North Carolina + remote team

Amount of Bitcoin Held in Treasury: N/A

Number of Employees: ~12 regular contributors

Website: https://bitaxe.org/

Public or Private? Open-source project (not a company)

Bitaxe’s founder, who goes by the nym Skot, has taken his hobby of tinkering with electronics and not only transformed it into a full-time gig but has catalyzed thousands to follow his lead.

Harnessing his training as electrical engineer and his Bitcoin enthusiasm, Skot began deconstructing Bitmain’s Bitcoin mining machines approximately two years ago. After gaining a better understanding of how they work, he reverse engineered one, creating the blueprint for Bitaxe — the first ever open-source ASIC-based Bitcoin mining machine — in early 2023.

“It was just a technical challenge initially,” Skot told Bitcoin Magazine.

That technical challenge has transformed into something bigger than he ever could have imagined, though. Skot created a low-power and affordable Bitcoin miner that anyone can plug in at home without running up a huge energy bill, while his work also paved the way for others interested in open-source Bitcoin mining to begin contributing to Bitaxe and other open-source mining initiatives like it (and related to it).

“The project has morphed into something that's bringing mining back to the open source fundamentals of Bitcoin itself,” Skot said.

“I've really become convinced that to be truly decentralized, which I think most people understand Bitcoin needs to be, all aspects of the development of Bitcoin needs to be open source,” he added.

“It needs to be open so that anyone who's even remotely interested can get in.”

Skot’s Journey To Bitaxe

Years back, while taking liberal arts courses at a community college, Skot stumbled on an issue of Make Magazine, a publication that features tutorials for DIY electronics projects. A switch flipped inside of him as he perused the magazine.

He completed a degree as an electrical engineer and then co-founded a design consultancy for Internet of Things (IOT)-related products, which he ran for 10 years. Skot enjoyed the work, but admitted that 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 Silk Road. While he was intrigued, it wasn’t enough to get him to buy bitcoin (or drugs) at the time.

Two years later, Skot learned about Bitcoin mining, and, soon after, built his first Bitcoin miner.

“I actually built a FPGA Bitcoin miner,” recalled Skot. “FPGAs were the precursor to ASICs.”

FPGA miners were designed with open-source code, making it easy for Skot to figure out how to construct one.

While he lost all of the bitcoin that he mined in a pool hack, he didn’t become discouraged. In fact, he became more fascinated with this cross section of electronics and the permissionless nature of Bitcoin.

“When I was learning about it, I was like, ‘Well, okay, so these are the rules of how Bitcoin mining works, but who made these rules? Who enforces these rules?’” recounted Skot.

“Learning that no one is at the center of this and no one enforces these rules — or we all do — was mind-blowing. It's a beautiful thing technically, and that intrigued me,” he added.

A few years later, he dove in deeper and developed the Bitaxe.

What is Bitaxe?

A Bitaxe is technically just open-source code that anyone can use to build a physical mining machine.

The bitaxeGamma is go! The newest member in the #bitaxe lineup features the BM1370 ASIC from the Antminer S21 Pro. So far we've been able to pull 1 - 1.2 TH/s at around 15 J/TH from a single chip