Bitaxe, NerdMiner and Lucky Miner: Lottery Mining Math

Daily expected revenue equals your hashrate divided by network hashrate, multiplied by daily network revenue. Run that with a few hundred gigahashes to a few terahashes against a network measured in hundreds of exahashes, and the result is a small fraction of a cent to a few cents per day.

Now subtract power. A 15 W device costs roughly a few cents per day at typical residential rates. For most open-source miners, pool-mode expected revenue does not cover the electricity — the deficit is small, but it is a deficit.

In solo mode you are not buying yield, you are buying tickets. Probability of finding a block over a year is a small fraction of a percent for a device in this class, but the payoff is the entire block reward plus fees. Several hobbyists have genuinely hit blocks, which is why the community exists.

Treat solo mining on a small device as entertainment spending with a lottery-shaped distribution. The correct budget is what you would spend on a hobby, and the correct expectation is zero with a tiny chance of something remarkable.

Bitaxe designs centre on a single modern ASIC chip harvested from current-generation hardware, delivering the best hashrate per watt in the category and appealing to people who want open hardware they can repair and modify. NerdMiner v2 and v3 optimise for cost and simplicity on ESP32-class hardware with far lower hashrate. Lucky Miner units package similar silicon into a consumer-friendly enclosure with a display.

Rank them on hashrate per watt if you care about pool revenue, on hackability if you want to learn, and on noise and looks if it is going on a shelf. None of them will change your income.

They teach the full stack — stratum, difficulty, share submission, solo pool configuration, firmware flashing — at a few watts and zero noise. They are also excellent for testing pool setups and monitoring before you point real hardware at them, and they make the protocol tangible in a way a dashboard cannot.

For gifts, education and desk presence, they are the best category in mining. For income, they are not competing with a tested ASIC that produces hundreds of terahashes.

Take the same budget, add your power rate, and buy the most efficient tested ASIC that your circuit and noise tolerance allow. A single used previous-generation unit produces more hashrate in a second than a NerdMiner produces in a year, and it earns real Bitcoin at cheap power.

Many operators do both: an efficient machine in the garage for revenue, a Bitaxe on the desk for the lottery ticket and the conversation.