The honest answer to "will my Bitaxe Gamma ever find a Bitcoin block?" is yes — once every 10,420 years on median, given today's network conditions. That's not great. But it's not the whole story, and the numbers are stranger than you might expect.
The math, plain and unvarnished
A Bitaxe Gamma puts out roughly 1.2 TH/s — 1.2 trillion hashes per second. The Bitcoin network on 7 May 2026 is operating at ~970 EH/s, with difficulty ~132 T. Your odds of finding the next block on any given attempt are essentially:
your hashrate ÷ network hashrate
That comes out to about 1 in 800 million per block-attempt. Bitcoin produces a block every 10 minutes on average, so for one Bitaxe Gamma running 24/7:
- Probability per day: ~0.00002% (1 in 5.5 million)
- Probability per year: ~0.0066% (1 in 15,000)
- Median wait: 10,420 years
- 10% chance within: 1,580 years
- 90% chance within: 34,600 years
For comparison: winning a typical Powerball jackpot is roughly 1 in 290 million per ticket. Finding a Bitcoin block with a Bitaxe Gamma running 24/7 for one year is about 20,000 times more likely than winning Powerball with a single ticket — but the lottery ticket is over after one drawing, while a Bitaxe just keeps rolling.
If 1,000 Bitaxes ran for a year, you'd statistically expect roughly 0.07 blocks. So a Bitaxe collective of 100 people running their gear for a decade has a real shot — about 7%.
And yet — it happens
Despite the math, low-hashrate solo finds are documented. A few recent ones:
- July 2024: a miner with about 21 TH/s found block #851,355 via Cloverpool's solo channel. Reward: 3.125 BTC + fees.
- February 2024: a 19 TH/s solo CKpool participant solved a block.
- Multiple cases through 2024–2025: ~10 TH/s home rigs solving blocks on Solo CKpool and similar projects.
This is exponential-distribution variance at work. Mean and median diverge wildly when probabilities are tiny but the prize is fixed. Most miners won't see a block in their lifetime — but a small fraction will see one quickly. The expected reward per Bitaxe per year is roughly €18 today if you average it out, but the realised reward for any individual is either €0 or about €280,000.
So why mine on a Bitaxe at all?
If your goal is profit, don't mine on a Bitaxe Gamma. The math is brutal: at €0.30/kWh and ~17 W, a Gamma costs you about €45/year. Expected reward at the current BTC price (~€68,000): roughly €18/year. You're paying €27/year for a slim chance at €280k.
The reasons people do it anyway are legitimate but rarely about expected value:
- Lottery psychology with smaller stakes than the real lottery. €27/year is less than you spend on coffee in a week.
- Network decentralization. Every independent hashrate, no matter how small, helps Bitcoin resist capture by large pools. A million Bitaxes worldwide is a real political force.
- Sovereignty learning. Running your own miner connected to your own node teaches you more about Bitcoin than 100 hours of YouTube.
- The hobby itself. Soldering, monitoring, tweaking — it's fun, like ham radio in 1972.
- The dream. Finding 3.125 BTC by yourself is a story you'll tell for the rest of your life.
What Maenpolder offers a Bitaxe owner specifically
If you're going to play this lottery, the question becomes: which pool maximises your reward when the unlikely happens?
Maenpolder's terms are simple:
- 0% pool fee, permanent. Sponsor-supported, not a promotional rate. If your Bitaxe finds a block, the entire 3.125 BTC subsidy plus all transaction fees go to your wallet — minus zero pool deduction.
- Non-custodial via Bitcoin coinbase. The reward goes directly to the bitcoin-address you used as your stratum username. Maenpolder has no wallet, no withdrawal flow, no minimum-payout. The Bitcoin protocol enforces it on layer 1.
- TLS stratum on port 3334. If your Bitaxe sits somewhere your network might be sniffed, encrypted stratum prevents share-stealing or watering-hole attacks.
- Live solo-lottery dashboard. Real-time time-to-block estimate, next-block reward in EUR (subsidy + projected mempool fees), per-worker hashrate trends, share-variance visualisation. Designed to make the long wait visible and interesting.
- GDPR-compliant by design. No tracking, no analytics, no third-party scripts.
Setup
Two lines in your Bitaxe's web UI under Settings → Stratum:
Host: maenpolder.com
Port: 3334 (TLS — recommended)
or 3333 (plaintext)
Username: your-bitcoin-address[.optional-worker-name]
Password: xSave and reboot. Within 30 seconds you'll see your hashrate appear on maenpolder.com, watch your shares accumulate, and see your time-to-block estimate update with the network. Your Bitaxe is now part of a Dutch non-custodial pool, contributing real hashrate to a global lottery you might just win.
One last thing
Don't run mining hardware you can't afford to write off completely. Don't quit your job. Don't tell your spouse you'll be mortgage-free in three years. Mining-for-profit on home equipment is almost always a losing proposition.
But if you're already heating a room with a small heater — and your Bitaxe gives off about as much warmth as a 17 W bulb — you might as well point it at a 0% non-custodial pool that respects your sovereignty and tells you the truth about the math.
The blockchain doesn't care who finds the next block. But somebody will. With non-zero probability, it can be you.