“The current mining landscape is dominated by proprietary, closed-source players who aren’t really serving the needs of the market. That creates an opportunity for open source mining to matter again.”
Bitaxe creator Skot dives into the state of modern Bitcoin mining, where a small handful of industry players control nearly every facet of mining hardware and ASIC production—in a tightly sealed, closed-source environment.
While Bitcoin software developers often champion a rigorously open-source ethos in building, Skot shares why the mining industry “isn’t like that” and how closed-source mining production creates unique centralization vectors—from limiting participation by “pleb” solo miners to exacerbating geopolitical risks on an industrial scale.
Thankfully, we’re starting to see a shift in demand and supply of open-source mining tools—including the recent development of “Bitaxes,” which have notably revived the solo miner community over the last year.
In this episode, Skot shares the full history of the open-source mining movement, including:
- How ASIC manufacturers like Bitmain and foundries like TSMC came to dominate the industry, and why competition at the silicon layer is so challenging
- The geopolitics of chip manufacturing and the near-monopoly of China & Taiwan in developing ASIC technology
- Why mining systems producers keep their technology so close to the vest, and who these closed-source systems most hurt in the process
- How advocates at the independent and corporate levels (think: Skot and Jack Dorsey) are challenging the status quo and leading the open-source mining revolution
Shout-outs in this episode to the Texas Energy and Mining Summit Bitcoin Park, and early Bitaxe supporters ZK shark and Ordinal Maxi Biz.
This episode of Bitcoin Rails is powered by:
- Best In Slot — the leading API for Ordinals and BRC-20 data aggregation and indexing.
- Spark — a statechains implementation advancing Bitcoin-powered payments.
- Citrea — a leading Bitcoin rollup technology and BitVM alliance contributor.
TIMESTAMPS 📌
00:00 Intro
01:27 Diving Into Bitaxe and Ordinals
04:02 The Open Source Nature of Bitaxe
05:43 Challenges in Chip Manufacturing
07:27 The Role of TSMC and Bitmain in Mining
15:26 The Evolution and Impact of Bitaxe
22:31 The First Bitaxe Manufacturer
31:28 Why Are People Buying Bitaxes?
35:47 A Different Way of Thinking About Bitcoin Mining
37:54 Decentralization and Home Mining
41:12 Ongoing Challenges in Chip Manufacturing
44:07 How Did Jack Dorsey Get Chips From TSMC?
49:03 How Bitcoin Mining Chips Interact With Software
01:04:51 The Role of Open Source in Bitcoin’s Future
