Hey,
I'm trying to understand how solomining is useful when the hashrate of those devices is so small? How does it help with decentralisation? What am I missing? Also, does anyone know what does Bitmain and MicroBT benefit from this? And one last question, do you know if these ASICs are going to be manufactured in the US any time soon? (I doubt EU...)
I read this, where b10c said:
More individuals home-mining with small miners help too, however, the home-mining hashrate is currently still negligible compared to the industrial hashrate.
Solo miners are still winning blocks. Every month we usually see one or two that were solo mined.
Last few I remember seeing were from Public Pool and Parasite.
https://mempool.space/block/000000000000000000003e63468b8762b040753d410dee14f2b83815f17ab984
https://mempool.space/block/0000000000000000000187fb7ba74cbf834b0258890ae289e50b09dd4167b098
I've heard that they win blocks. That's phenomenal. But apart from that, what else?
finding a block and getting the 3.25 bitcoin reward is the whole thing.
What else are you expecting. That is the point of mining Bitcoin.
Ignoring overhead, those chips being parallelized on a board, and then with 100s of boxes with 100s of chips all hashing in parallel in a big warehouse, means you can also put 1 chip in each home.
The reduction in overhead and higher frequency of payout at scale are what makes the centralization pressure, but it only matters if the electricity cost is non-negligible.
However, if an additional 15W doesn't make a dent in your electricity bill (basically: for everyone running airconditioning) then the overhead and payment frequency doesn't matter, and you can just mine. And then, even if you never find a block, you still had some fun, an interesting story to talk about, and a dashboard to stare at that probably damages your brain less than doomscrolling tiktok. Nothing to lose.
But isn't that the kind of assumption what early internet creators thought that all of the world would run servers in their homes, and have their own domains and so on? It didn't really pan out like that.
I'd say not right now, no, but I expect that it'll ebb and flow just like urbanization/suburbanization does. The internet is still young too. And PS, I run servers, I own domains, I do a lot of p2p and local stuff. Don't think in absolutes, think in pressures and counterpressures on the delta between the absolutes.
Best that can happen right now is having 5-10 million BitAxes in homes.
Hey optimism, thanks for the optimism (pun intended). I'll send some sats on your way ;)
For once I actually live up to the nym without sarcasm.
Solo mining with low hashrate functions like a lottery where the payoff is the full block reward instead of tiny pool splits. It aids decentralization because solo miners run their own nodes and construct their own blocks, preventing large pools from having total control over which transactions are included. While the statistical probability of finding a block is near zero for small devices, it ensures the network remains censorship-resistant and geographically distributed. It's simply a trade-off between guaranteed micro-payments and a theoretical jackpot that supports network sovereignty. Every hash produced that isn't pointed at centralized mining pools and shared block templates helps decentralize the network.
Jack Dorsey Block/Proto has been developing ASIC chips and modular miners that are US designed and manufactured.
more important in terms of decentralization of mining is block template creation.
https://stratumprotocol.org/
It's less about actually winning a block and more about understanding how everything works under the hood. Once you run your own miner you see block templates, fees, propagation firsthand instead of just reading about it.
For decentralization it's about having the infrastructure there before you need it. Not after.
The denominator in your question is doing a lot of the work. You're comparing home hashrate against industrial petahash and concluding the home contribution is "negligible." On pure hashrate, that's true. But hashrate isn't the lever here. Block template construction is.
When a home miner runs their own node, builds their own template, and points hash at it (via Public Pool, OCEAN's TIDES, DATUM, whatever), they're producing a sovereign template. One that no pool operator gets to censor or reorder. That part scales nonlinearly. One home miner lifts the censorship-resistance floor in a way that 1 TH of Foundry-pointed hash never does, because Foundry decides what goes in the block, not the hasher. Stratum V2 and DATUM make this much easier to reason about now than it was two years ago.
The block-finding lottery is the dopamine layer. Fun, talked-about, occasionally life-changing. But the actual product is having millions of independent template builders in the network. That's the thing centralization pressure can't easily undo once it exists.