Made in Melbourne for curious Aussies

Mine Bitcoin at home in Australia. The honest beginner's guide.

A little box on your desk, humming away, buying you a ticket in Bitcoin's lottery every ten minutes. It's a fun hobby, a great way to learn how Bitcoin really works, and a small way to keep it decentralised. Here's everything you need, minus the hype.

Start here See the buying guide

Independent. No paid rankings. Prices checked across 16 stores on 2 Nov 2026.

The basics

What is home Bitcoin mining?

Bitcoin miners are computers that race to solve a maths puzzle. Roughly every ten minutes someone wins, adds the next "block" of transactions to Bitcoin's ledger, and collects the reward: currently about 3.140 BTC ($348,153). A home miner is a small, efficient version of the warehouse machines, made to sit on a shelf.

What the box actually does

It guesses numbers, trillions of times a second (that's what "TH/s" means). Every guess is a lottery ticket. It doesn't store your money or need any skills: plug it in, connect it to wifi, point it at a pool.

A hobby, not a money printer

Let's be upfront: at Australian power prices, a small miner usually costs more in electricity than it earns. People do it to learn, for the thrill of the lottery, to warm a room, and because every independent miner makes Bitcoin harder to control.

Noise, heat and power

Every watt becomes heat. A Bitaxe uses about 18 W (around $44 a year on Victorian default rates) and has a small fan. Bigger miners are louder and hotter: great in a Hobart winter, less so in a Darwin summer.

Do I need to be technical?

Not really. If you can set up a smart plug, you can set up a Bitaxe or Avalon Nano. You'll need a Bitcoin address to be paid to, 2.4 GHz wifi, and a spot with some airflow.

Solo mining

The lottery

Your miner tries for the whole block on its own. You'll almost certainly never win, but if you do, it's life-changing. A Bitaxe Gamma has roughly a 1 in 16,800 chance each year today.

Pool mining

The syndicate

Thousands of miners share their work and split every reward. You get small, steady payments (often cents a day for a small miner), but it's predictable. Compare pools.

3.14 BTC

≈ $347,979 at today's price

True story · July 2026

A little Bitaxe won the whole block

On 9 July 2026 (UTC), a single Bitaxe Gamma mining solo on Public Pool found block 957,382, a 3.1382 BTC reward worth about US$200,000. At about 1 TH/s its odds were roughly 1 in 18,000 per year, and news reports say it had been running for around eight hours. It's not a plan, it's a lottery, but it shows why people love this hobby.

Sources: CoinDesk (14 Jul 2026) and others. The block is on-chain; the hardware and uptime come from news reports and can't be verified on-chain. See all recent solo blocks.

Getting started