Lars Näther – Bitaxe: Open Source Bitcoin Mining

Mining is one of Bitcoin’s three essential pillars — yet it’s the one nobody talks about. At BTC Prague, I made the case for why open source mining isn’t optional, and how the Bitaxe project is trying to give that power back to the people.

The Question Nobody Asks

At conferences like this, you learn about running nodes, creating transactions, improving your opsec. But what about mining? You walk past booths offering to host your machines or sell you the next big device — but do you actually know what’s inside? How it works? What it lacks? What they’re not telling you? That’s what I want to talk about.

Bitcoin’s Three Pillars

I think of Bitcoin as a house built on three pillars. The first is nodes — your local database of the entire blockchain. The second is transactions — the exchanges that flow through the network. And the third is mining — the process that organizes those transactions into blocks and secures the chain. Remove any one of these pillars and the whole house collapses. That’s not a metaphor. That’s the reality we need to take seriously.

The Centralization Problem

Bitcoin was born in 2008 as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system — no middlemen, no control, open to everyone. It launched under the MIT license so anybody could read it, understand it, and build on it. That spirit is largely gone from mining today. Three pools — Foundry, F2Pool, and ViaBTC — control over 65% of the network hash rate. Ask yourself whether you want to trust them with that much power. I don’t.

We’ve also seen what happens when we do trust blindly. Back in 2013 and 2014, backdoors were discovered in mining devices. Nobody knew until researchers dug in and published their findings. That should terrify all of us. Mining has evolved from CPU to GPU to FPGA to ASIC chips, becoming more efficient — but also more proprietary, more closed, and more concentrated in the hands of a few manufacturers.

Where Bitaxe Comes From

That’s the problem. Now let me tell you about the solution we’re building. I’m one of the developers of the Bitaxe — a fully open source home mining device. The story starts in 2019 with Scott, an American electronics engineer, who wanted to build something he could mine with during the day. He called it the Day Miner. It took him almost two years to get a rough prototype, and even then it barely worked. More attempts followed, each one teaching us a little more about how to work with the ASIC chip — a proprietary Bitmain component that we reverse engineered and then published everything about, openly.

By October 2022 we had something functional, if ugly. By January 2023 the first real Bitaxe board was born — plug it into a power outlet and you’re mining. No programming knowledge required. I joined the effort along the way and helped push it forward. By March 2023, we finally had something we could hand to a complete beginner.

Open Source, No Company Behind It

What rose out of that process is a community called Open Source Miners United. There is no company behind Bitaxe. No NGO. No VC. It’s a fully decentralized group of contributors spread across the world — roughly 15 software maintainers and 5 hardware maintainers. I’ve met maybe four of them in person. We coordinate through Discord and share everything through GitHub. Hardware files, firmware, software — all of it visible, auditable, forkable. Don’t like something? Change it. Build your own board. We actively encourage that.

Education Is the Only Key

Not everyone can read code, and that’s fine. But the option has to exist. We offer free educational resources to help people get there. Because knowledge is the only thing that keeps these pillars standing. If we