The Bitaxe (1397)

The Bitaxe (1397) is, simply put, “a fully assembled, open-source plug-and-play Bitcoin solo miner”. 

It is an Open-Source ASIC Bitcoin miner. Unlike many other ASIC miners, this is not a polished commercial product. 
It is a very raw miner when compared to, for example, the Antminer T17, Antminer S9, Antminer L3,.. who come as pre-assembled units with elaborate cooling, casings and wiring. 

The Bitaxe (1397) is the raw electronic board with a ventilator cooling down the ASIC-chips contained therein. No casing nor elaborate additional circuitry for noise-cancellation and advanced cooling. 
The raw deal. 

Why the review? Why the focus? 

There are a few IMPORTANT factors that should place the BitAxe on your wishlist and makes it of significant importance to the mining community. 

First and foremost; it is OpenSource. Meaning that its coding and built-up is freely available to the public. 
Meaning that, because it is OpenSource, ANYONE can start to experiment and build upon the work done by skot9000. Anyone can start tweaking and improving upon it. It means detracting power from the current BitMain company which more or less holds a monopoly when it comes down to manufacturing ASIC-chips and ASIC-miners. It allows for a free market to take place and competition to appear which can, and will, drive down prizes. 

Another advantage of the project being OpenSource implies continuous development based on passion by the community, NOT spurred and sustained based on economic (company) models. 

The Specs 

We will have to be honest here. The BitAxe is not as powerful as the fully-fledged Antminers which exist. Where the Antminer T17 boosts 40Th/s, the Antminer S9 boosts 14TH/s, Antminer S17 boosts 53Th/s and the Antminer L3+ boosts 504MH/s does The Bitaxe boosts a reasonable 400GH/s. It outperforms the Antminer L3+ by a significant margin but falls short when compared to the others. 

Does it mean that it is unprofitable due to its significant lower hashrate? 
No. The great advantage the Bitaxe has is with its initial purchasing cost as well as EXTREMELY low power-consumption. Both of these values are important in order to calculate profitability costs. Us miners want to find the best balance in “high hashrate with lowest costs possible”. Where it concerns initial investment costs is the only miner that is significantly cheaper than the BitAxe, the Antminer S9.  
But then comes the electricity consumption of both into play. Here, the Antminer S9 follows its “peers” in power consumption which is in the range of 1kw. The Bitaxe, on the other hand, only consumes about 15W of power in total (or about a 100 times less). This low amount of power-use reduces mining costs greatly and helps increasing profitability for the miners. 

Due to its low price it is possible to start stacking, for retail, this little miner in order to achieve the hashrates as being performed by its industrially produced and commercialized brothers and sisters (the Antminers). 

Development is still ongoing for this product which gave rise to the development of The Bitaxe Ultra who is a bit stronger in hash-output. More on the BitAxe ultra in its own properly dedicated review (TBA). 

Like another product I took a fancy to this year, the NerdMiner, does it come equipped with an integrated WiFi module which makes for direct mining to pool over WiFi possible. A little handy “extra” that takes technical hurdles away for the newbs who want to start with Bitcoin mining but aren’t as technically inclined. 

But it is not all sunshine and rainbows and there’s a few drawbacks. 
A strong case could be made about its peers (the Antminers and the like) being more powerful where it concerns output. While this is definitely true, it would not be the main thing to focus on. After all, is this budding Open-Source project ALREADY powerful enough to outperform many older Bitcoin miners and the (still) actual Antminer L3+ in hashrate.  

The only real hurdle is the lack of protective casing and dedicated “kit”. We have a raw piece of electronics after all. A protective casing must be foreseen with some filters and slightly more advanced cooling. 

… though this applies ONLY when buying the BitAxe as standalone. The Minibit 1397 is the fully-fledged version of this product whereby the BitAxe has its very own casing and full load-out. 

The Bitaxe (1397); as spoken about until now, is the naked version with which builders can go crazy. 
This means that with the necessary amount of dedication and creativity the Bitaxe CAN be used in dual-purpose mining applications.