Does this Make Bitcoin Mining Easier?

[00:00:00]I have reviewed a lot of Bitaxes over the years, and honestly, they're all kind of starting to feel more or less the same. Same chips, same setup process, same software. [music] But this one does something a little bit different. Has its own app. Let you remotely control and monitor your Bitax from [music] anywhere. But does a Bitax really need its own app?

[00:00:22]Star Miner is the sponsor of today's video and they did send over this custom Bitax Gamma 601 so I can show you how it works with their own app and you can decide if this is something cool for the Bitcoin space or something that we don't need. And I'm looking forward to hearing from you down in the comments section after you watch this video. But let's just get started diving right in. And what I want you to think about is if you're a beginner like does this make it really easy? And if you're somebody who's used Bitax for a while, is this even necessary considering some of the options that are out there? Let's get started. We got to unbox this thing.

[00:00:57]Inside there, you're gonna have the user guide, which hang on to this cuz you're going to need it later during the setup.

[00:01:01]But otherwise, you're going to have your small little amazing Bitax Gamma 601.

[00:01:07]This is a Bitcoin miner for you to use right in your home. And man, I wish I had these when I got into Bitcoin mining almost a decade ago. What an amazing little entry-level piece to really help you understand foundationally how Bitcoin mining works and how amazing it is. On it, you're going to have its USBC port in case you need to plug it into a computer. You're also going to have its boot and reset switches on the side.

[00:01:29]It's got an amazing little display, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth built in. But the main show is underneath this fan and heat sink. And that is the ASIC chip, the Bitcoin mining chip. This is a specialized chip. This isn't like a computer CPU chip. All this thing can do is mine Bitcoin, and it can do it exceptionally well. You're also going to have its power adapter, which is 30 watts, really low power, and that is amazing for us to run right in our homes. All that's left to do is plug it in and let it boot up. And listen, if you're brand new to Bitaxes and Bitcoin, I think this is where it becomes very easy compared to what we usually have to do. If you've been around for a while, I want to hear from you again in the comments section if you think this is useful for people that are beginners in Bitaxes or not. Because what we're going to do is we're going to download an app, the Star Miner app. It's available on Google Play or iOS. Once you download that, the next thing you're going to do is create a new account with your email address. It's going to send you a verification code to your email address.

[00:02:29]Go grab that. Put it in. Set up a password. And then come back and log in for the very first time. From there, you're going to go to devices. You're going to add a new device with that plus button. Make sure Bluetooth is turned on on your mobile device. And then it's going to find the Bitax through a Bluetooth connection and add it. And actually, it binds it to your unique mobile phone, which is very different than anything that I've seen before. And the way it's going to do this is using a unique authorization code which you got to go back to your user guide and get.

[00:03:04]So you can either type it in, it's very long, or scan the QR code with your mobile phone. Last thing you got to do is teach your Wi-Fi network. So just put in your Wi-Fi network name followed by the password and then we are done. Now you're at the dashboard. And this is where we get to see how cool this is for somebody who's brand new into Bitaxes or Bitcoin mining. You can see it's hash rate right on the main page. And you can monitor that in increments between 5 minutes or 1 hour and 1 day. If you head to the settings, this is where you can adjust a couple things. Most importantly, the pool. I've covered pool mining versus solo mining. I had to get this set up quite extensively. So, if you need help on that, I'll have a video linked up in the card above to teach you even more. And then this is a really fun little feature I haven't seen on a BitAx before, but you can turn on the Bitax LED, which just brightens up the little screen on the Bitax, and it says a cute little high. There's a couple unique features. Number one, you can actually sleep the Bitax from here. You can just put it to rest, but it'll be in like a standby mode so that you can also come back later in this app again from wherever you are and power it on. Along with that control to be able to turn it on or off or I guess really put it to sleep and wake it up, you can also schedule a task. So here you could schedule it to mine for a certain amount of time and then turn off. Maybe you want to take advantage of solar power or your power in your area is cheaper during certain times of the day. The only thing that was a little bit of a surprise to me, but I think I also get why, is that it seems like out of the box, at least for me, I got 180 days access to the full potential of what this app that I'm showing you can do.

[00:04:45]After that, it looks like you got to pay 99, at least that's what it says right now, monthly to get full access to all of the control that you can have in their custom app with their custom firmware on the Bitax Gamma. I guess I understand, right? Like they've built this and they have some kind of infrastructure that they have to maintain for this communication to happen. probably something in a server or a cloud somewhere where it goes from the app and it goes up to that and then it pings your bid axe. It's they got to have something, right? So, I understand where you you probably have to pay for that in some way, but I didn't realize that going into making this video. So, it caught me a little bit by surprise when I was checking it out. So, just know that. Let me know what you think about that down in the comment section.

[00:05:32]I think for a beginner, you could just use this app and be totally fine. But if you did want to go to some advanced stuff, I'm going to show you what this app doesn't do, but that you still can do using Axos. So, let's go check that out. Already looks a little bit different. So, number one, we have a homepage that shares a ton of the information I went over earlier in this video and ultimately tells you you got to get over to the Star Miner app and do everything in there. And it will remind you too if you go to do an update in Axos, pretty much saying do not use the Bitax official firmware updates. You cannot use that because it will break all connectivity that this special BitAx gamma has with the Star Miner app. So you got to do again everything through the Star Miner app if you want to do any updates. Everything else in Axos is more or less the same. You're going to have your dashboard and what I'm going to do just in case you're a beginner or you need to learn a little bit, I'm going to go over just the top four tiles here and then we'll keep going on in this video.

[00:06:32]So what is hash rate? Hash rate is the amount of hash attempts per second that your machine has made. What are hash attempts? Well, they're like guesses.

[00:06:42]They're random numbers that are being compared to the number needed to mine the next Bitcoin block. So, think about that for a second. That is 1.1 trillion hash attempts or guesses per second that the ASIC chip inside that Bitax is doing. And that is a ton of computational work, but it is so small in the scale of all of the Bitcoin mining machines out in the entire world.

[00:07:16]Okay. Next, efficiency. This is simply a measure of how much performance you're getting for how much power the machine is using. Generally, a lower number here is better. I'll show you in a little bit how you can achieve that. But this is all really healthy, especially for such a low power machine like this.

[00:07:33]shares. This is your communication back and forth to the mining pool that is connecting you directly to Bitcoin.

[00:07:40]Making sure that you have shares here.

[00:07:42]Just make sure that you have good connectivity to that pool. They're recognizing the work that your mining machine is doing and essentially Bitcoin is accepting that into its network.

[00:07:53]Difficulty. I really didn't understand this one when I first got involved into Bitcoin and crypto. So hopefully I can do a good explanation now. And this is a really fun number too. This is the number that they have leaderboards for.

[00:08:05]You can compare against different mining machines. You could check in regularly to see. But ultimately, this is showing you is how hard of a math problem did your machine solve.

[00:08:15]And you have to solve the the the hardest one before anybody else to get the next Bitcoin block. But this will keep a measure of like how hard of a one did you solve while you were attempting that. And so what you see here in the short amount of time is I solved one that was 2.4. 4 m which is million and then the next step up would be billion which we'll see G and that's my other Bitax gamma 601 solved a 191 billion difficulty math problem that's I think the best I've got on all of my solo miners but you will see people out there who got into the trillion and that's super rare and then what this does is if you get a difficulty number that is equal to or greater than the network difficulty of Bitcoin, that means you got the Bitcoin block, like you did it.

[00:09:05]You got a big payday. But otherwise, it keeps records of like how hard of one you did solve over time. And so, it's just a fun way to compare and just see how close you got. Ultimately, it's meaningless because you didn't get the number needed, but it's still adds a lot of value and fun to. Now, the one thing I think people get confused about is they think they're like making progress towards getting there. It's not. It's probability. The one I want to really show you which is again getting us into that advanced is the uh settings for the overclocks. So you can actually adjust the frequency of this ASIC chip inside here and the amount of voltage being sent to it. And what you can do is you can either get more performance or save more power. And if you're curious about that, good news. I have a full video covering all of this. I'll leave it linked up in the card above. Now, those of you out there who are deep into Bitax and Nerdax mining like I am, this whole time have probably been thinking, "But Mike, there's already an app out there that everybody uses. It's called Hashwatcher. Why would they use this?"

[00:10:05]That's the same thing I've been thinking as I've been making this whole video.

[00:10:08]And I think it probably comes down to this Hasher probably for like the intermediate advanced, probably like a next step up. Whereas this star miner is like out of the box all-in-one easy setup. Like the product that you buy comes with this app and it just works.

[00:10:29]Whereas Hashwatcher is something that you typically discover later and then you connect all your machines to it. And when you do that, it works amazingly well. But it takes some discoverability whereas anybody can just go buy this star miner and just be up and going and be able to remotely manage this wherever they are. And I think that's great. So this is probably again like for the beginner. I think about it in the way I think about the Canon Avalon series, right? You open those up and they have their own app to get you going and that's all you have to do. Like that's a product that you could just go buy on a shelf somewhere, take it home and be able to use an app just like you're used to with many of the other products in your life and it's really made for the beginner. And I think the star miner Bitex Gamma follows that same instinct to just get it in somebody's hands and make it really accessible. And hey, that's great, right? That's great for Bitcoin. And if it's great for Bitcoin, it's great for me and it's great for all of us because the more people that we can bring in and the easier we can make this because it has not always been easy, then the better we all are for it.

[00:11:37]I think that's [music] it. Thanks, Star Miner for sponsoring today's video, sending over your custom Bitax so I [music] could show everybody what it's made of. I hope you also learned something about Bitcoin mining along the way that you didn't know before. If you did, let me know down in the comments section below. [music] Otherwise, I got two other videos for you to check out. One is another amazing entrylevel Bitcoin miner. It's my son's favorite. This is the Canon Avalon [music] Nano 3S. And then if you want to see how to do that overclocking on the Bidax I was talking about earlier in this video, I'll leave my video for that on the screen as well. Otherwise, please take care of yourself and each other and I'll see you in one of those videos.