Best home Bitcoin miners

I rank only SHA-256 Bitcoin miners small and quiet enough for a desk or a closet. Nobody pays me to rank them and I sell none of them; there are no affiliate links here. Odds use the network hashrate mempool.space reported on November 5, 2026, about 1,017 EH/s. Power cost assumes the machine runs around the clock at the August 2026 US residential average of 18.16 cents per kWh.

Expected value is simple: your share of the network hashrate times the blocks mined. At 1,017 EH/s and the 3.125 BTC subsidy, each 1 TH/s of hashing earns about 0.00016 BTC a year on average, roughly $12 at mempool.space's price of $75,888 on November 5, 2026, before fees on either side. The most efficient machine in my table, the NerdQAxe++, burns about $23 of power per TH/s a year at US average rates. Every miner here spends more on electricity than it earns, unless it wins a block.

People buy them anyway, and so would I: a home miner teaches you how mining works, adds a little hashrate outside the big pools, and holds a real chance at a block worth 3.125 BTC plus fees. Treat the power bill as the price of the ticket.

The Bitaxe is the open-source home miner everything else here gets compared to. The Gamma board design is published under the CERN Open Hardware Licence v2, strongly reciprocal, and its firmware, ESP-Miner, is GPL-3.0. The one closed part is the mining chip: a Bitmain BM1370 from the Antminer S21 Pro, which the project says is not open source.

Solo Satoshi lists the Gamma 602 at $61 to $72, about 1.2 TH/s at 18 to 20 W. At that hashrate it would find a block on its own about once in 16,100 years, for about $30 a year in power. It is the cheapest way into mining I know of, and my Bitaxe setup guide walks through the power supply, Wi-Fi, and pool settings. It also makes a good Bitcoin gift.

The con: the project README warns the Gamma is much easier to overheat than earlier boards and calls cheap stock fans crap, suggesting a Noctua 5 V fan instead. Give it airflow and leave the frequency and voltage at stock.

The NerdQAxe++ puts four BM1370 chips on one board. Its designer's README lists about 4.8 TH/s at about 76 W, and Solo Satoshi lists Revision 7 at 4.8 TH/s and 69.5 W for $189.99 to $237.99. The hardware is under the same CERN strongly reciprocal licence as the Bitaxe, and its firmware, a fork of ESP-Miner, is GPL-3.0.

Four times the hashrate cuts the wait to about 4,000 years per block, for about $111 a year in power. The con: nobody publishes a noise figure for it, and it puts out nearly four times the heat of a Gamma.

The Apollo III is a 6.5 by 6.5 by 6 inch box rated 10 to 18 TH/s at 150 W in Eco mode to 375 W in Turbo, with a fan FutureBit puts under 35 dBA in Eco. The marketing line on the same page claims a 50 W to 400 W power range; I use the spec table. FutureBit sells it two ways: the Standard miner at $899.99, and the Full Node version from $1,099.99, which runs a Bitcoin node and a solo pool on the box itself.

At 10 TH/s in Eco it would find a block about once in 1,900 years for about $239 a year in power; Turbo cuts that to about 1,100 years and raises the bill to about $597. If you already planned to run your own node, the Full Node version gives you both on one power cord.

The firmware licence claim does not hold up. FutureBit publishes the source of its Apollo web OS on GitHub, but under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0, which forbids commercial use and modified versions, so it is source-available rather than open source. The same README says it installs bundled miner, node, and ckpool binaries.

Braiins rates the BMM 101 at 1.0 TH/s on 40 W, up to 80 W overclocked, at about 40 dB, with a 3.5-inch touchscreen, Wi-Fi, and Ethernet, for $299 and in stock. It is the first hardware with Stratum V2 built in, according to Braiins, which encrypts the connection to a pool that supports it.

Braiins publishes the board schematics and a hardware description on the product page. The firmware is Braiins OS, and I could not find its source on Braiins Forge's GitHub. When Braiins open-sourced its BCB100 control board, the release left out the mining component.

The con is price: $299 for 1 TH/s is about six times what the Bitaxe Gamma costs per TH/s, for odds of about one block in 19,300 years.

Canaan's Nano 3S is a sealed desktop unit rated at 6 TH/s on 140 W, 30 to 40 dB, with a GaN power adapter and three power levels. At its $219 sale price it is the cheapest hashrate in this list, about one block in 3,200 years, and its 140 W doubles as a little room heat. Power runs about $223 a year.

I rank it last for the firmware. Canaan's GitHub repository for the Nano 3S calls itself the network service layer source code, holds one commit, and shows no licence file. The rest of the firmware is not published, so you run what Canaan ships.

The math fits on one line. Your share of blocks is your hashrate divided by the network's, and the network aims for one block every 10 minutes. On November 5, 2026, mempool.space put the 3-day network hashrate at about 1,017 EH/s and difficulty at 148.36 trillion. A 1.2 TH/s Bitaxe Gamma is about 1 in 847 million of that, so on average it waits 847 million times 10 minutes: about 16,100 years.

My Bitaxe setup guide works from difficulty instead and gets about 16,800 years for the same miner, because blocks have been arriving a little slower than every 10 minutes. Either way the scale is the same, and luck has no memory: a miner has the same chance on its first hash as on its billionth.

A solo pool writes your address into the coinbase transaction of every block your miner works on. solo.ckpool.org, for example, tells you to set your username to your Bitcoin address and rejects an invalid one. If your miner wins, the reward lands on that address and nowhere else, so make it a hardware wallet address.

For solo mining, the pool hands your miner work and broadcasts a block if you find one. solo.ckpool.org charges a 2% fee, needs no registration, and listens on stratum.ckpool.org port 3333, with a Stratum V2 endpoint on port 3336 for miners like the BMM 101 that support it.

If you run a node, Public Pool on your own node skips the middleman: your miner builds on block templates from your own Bitcoin Core, and a Bitaxe pays no fee. My node guide covers the node itself.

Pooled (non-solo) mining pays small, steady amounts instead of a lottery ticket, but most pools hold your balance until it reaches a payout threshold, which means trusting the pool with it until then. Read a pool's payout terms before you point a miner at it.

The Avalon Mini 3 belongs in a different category: it is a baseboard-style space heater that mines. Canaan rates it at 37.5 TH/s on 800 W, 35 to 55 dB, with heater, mining, and night modes and an app thermostat. Solo Satoshi lists it at $749.99 on sale (from $1,288) and out of stock on November 5, 2026.

Its odds are the best here, about one block in 520 years, and its power bill is the worst: about $1,274 a year if it ran nonstop at 800 W. Every watt becomes heat, so it only makes sense in a room you would heat with an 800 W electric heater anyway, and in summer it is a space heater you don't want. I keep it out of the ranking because it is a heater first, and because I found no published firmware source for it on Canaan's GitHub.

The NerdMiner v2 is MIT-licensed firmware for a cheap ESP32 display board, with no mining chip at all. The project describes it as a way to learn about mining and try for a block with a small piece of hardware. Powermining, which sells them, lists the T-Display version at up to 256 KH/s on about 1 W.

That is about 4.7 million times slower than a Bitaxe Gamma, or one block in roughly 75 billion years at today's hashrate. I don't rank it. It is a desk ornament that teaches you Stratum, and that is fine.

Open Bitaxe-family boards with more chips sit between the Gamma and the Apollo. I have not rated them, so they stay out of the ranking. Solo Satoshi's under-$500 list marks all three open source:

If this miner ever wins, 3.125 BTC plus fees lands on the address you typed in. Make it an address from a wallet whose keys never touch the internet.