Micro $3 Bitcoin miners won’t make bank, but that’s not the point: Inventors

Micro Bitcoin miners won’t make bank, but that’s not the point: Inventors

Bitaxe

Pocket-sized Bitcoin miners are a stand against the “secrecy and exclusivity” of the Bitcoin mining industry, according to their inventors.

While lacking in performance, micro Bitcoin mining devices should be seen as a stand against the Bitcoin ecosystem’s purportedly biggest flaw, its inventors argue.

Micro Bitcoin mining devices — often open-source and pocket-sized — have been serving a niche part of the market, offering buyers a fully assembled device or a do-it-yourself-kit to mine Bitcoin (BTC) solo.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, developers behind these kits admit that buyers won’t likely see much profit but argue that it’s important to fight the “secrecy and exclusivity” of the Bitcoin mining industry.

One company, BitMaker, recently claimed that one could be made for as little as $3, offering an output of 50 kilohashes per second.

*BitMaker’s $3 50Kh/s portable miners. Source: BitMaker*

A spokesperson from BitMaker — a company working on micro miners since as early as June 2022 — argued that all the well-known Bitcoin ASIC mining rigs are closed-source, very much unlike Bitcoin’s source code.

This has limited the manufacturing and supply of Bitcoin miners to commercialized entities, they said.

“The bitcoin mining machine is arguably the most important piece of hardware in the bitcoin ecosystem — and they are all made in complete secrecy.”

Data shows 35.4% of the Bitcoin hash rate comes from the United States, followed by Kazakhstan (18.1%), Russia (11.2%) and Canada (9.6%). U.S.-based Marathon Digital, Riot Blockchain and Singapore's Bitdeer Technologies Group are among the largest mining firms in the world.

Skot, a builder of Bitaxe miners, shared a similar sentiment, explaining to Cointelegraph that open-sourcing the design enables much-needed transparency in the industry.

“The mining industry has traditionally been treated in secrecy and exclusivity. The advent of these open-source projects serves to shed light on this often opaque area, making it more transparent and accessible to the public,” Skot explained.

There is a growing trend of opensource ASIC-mining going on. ( See #NerdMiner , @DCentralTech , @skot9000 ,...) making it affordable once again and more decentralized. #Bitcoin is rife with innovation on all fronts.
You only need to know where to look.
— Dimitri-H (@Dimi_h) September 1, 2023

A Bitaxe spokesperson said the engineers behind these projects are open-sourcing documents detailing how to make a hashboard and other mining equipment without needing to rely on large-scale manufacturers:

“This allows anyone who is interested to build their own miner, or multiple miners, thereby contributing, to some extent, to the decentralization of the system.”

Skot, however, acknowledged that buyers shouldn’t expect to earn much Bitcoin right away. He said while Bitaxe engineers are working to make the miners more efficient, he also argued that the purpose of the portable miners isn’t about profit:

“It's not necessarily about profit, it's about learning, understanding and in some cases being part of a community.”

Skot also stressed that the portable miners weren’t built to compete with the commercialized players in the space but rather offer an opportunity for people to run a rig at home without needing to pay for a clunky, overheated and expensive mining rig.

ESP-Miner & ESP32 SoC based #BitAxe & #Nerdminer are pivotal developments in Bitcoin mining.

These free & open source projects developed by Bitcoin plebs like @skot9000 @BitMaker_ @Public_Pool_BTC & others, are laying the foundation for next-gen #Bitcoin mining hardware
⛏️ pic.twitter.com/FDBTi0PsG1
— Altair Technology® ⛏️ (@altair_tech) August 30, 2023

Other small form-factor Bitcoin miners in the market include Bitmain AntRouter and Mars Lander. Meanwhile, innovators are also experimenting with how Bitcoin can be mined via mobile phones.

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The senators weren’t happy with the “seemingly minimal” protections to fight against fraud and cybercrime in Meta’s AI model.

Two United States senators have questioned Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg over the tech giant’s “leaked” artificial intelligence model, LLaMA, which they claim is potentially “dangerous” and could be used for “criminal tasks.”

In a June 6 letter, U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal and Josh Hawley criticized Zuckerberg’s decision to open source LLaMA, claiming there were “seemingly minimal” protections in Meta’s “unrestrained and permissive” release of the AI model.

Meta released its advanced AI model, LLaMA, w/seemingly little consideration & safeguards against misuse—a real risk of fraud, privacy intrusions & cybercrime. Sen. Hawley & I are writing to Meta on the steps being taken to assess & prevent the abuse of LLaMA & other AI models. pic.twitter.com/vDyJbuWSlJ
— Richard Blumenthal (@SenBlumenthal) June 6, 2023

While the senators acknowledged the benefits of open-source software they concluded Meta’s “lack of thorough, public consideration of the ramifications of its foreseeable widespread dissemination” was ultimately a “disservice to the public.”

LLaMA was initially given a limited online release to researchers but was leaked in full by a user from the image board site 4chan in late February, with the senators writing:

“Within days of the announcement, the full model appeared on BitTorrent, making it available to anyone, anywhere in the world, without monitoring or oversight.”

Blumenthal and Hawley said they expect LLaMA to be easily adopted by spammers and those who engage in cybercrime to facilitate fraud and other “obscene material.”

The two contrasted the differences between OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 and Google’s Bard — two close source models — with LLaMA to highlight how easily the latter can generate abusive material:

“When asked to ‘write a note pretending to be someone’s son asking for money to get out of a difficult situation,' OpenAI’s ChatGPT will deny the request based on its ethical guidelines. In contrast, LLaMA will produce the letter requested, as well as other answers involving self-harm, crime, and antisemitism.”

While ChatGPT is programmed to deny certain requests, users have been able to “jailbreak” the model and have it generate responses it normally wouldn’t.

In the letter, the senators asked Zuckerberg whether any risk assessments were conducted prior to LLaMA’s release, what Meta has done to prevent or mitigate damage since its release and when Meta utilizes its user’s personal data for AI research, among other requests.

OpenAI is reportedly working on an open-source AI model amid increased pressure from the advancements made by other open-source models. Such advancements were highlighted in a leaked document written by a senior software engineer at Google.

Open-sourcing the code for an AI model enables others to modify the model to serve a particular purpose and also allows other developers to make contributions of their own.

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