Hashrate Hearth
Network 1,054 EH/s BTC $84,651 Block 972,487
Network data as of 20 Oct 2026

Learn on a Bitaxe. Defend your wealth with real hashrate.

Two companies build 58% of Bitcoin's block templates, so they decide which payments get confirmed. Taking that majority away takes about 164 EH/s of new hashrate on its own templates. That means kilowatt machines in a lot of homes, heating them or running on surplus solar. A Bitaxe is the best classroom in mining, but counted as defense it's a trinket.

This isn't charity. If those builders are told to leave payments out, the payments left out are yours. Many industrial miners sell what they mine to cover power and debt, and they answer to compliance departments. You're the one holding the bitcoin.

Run the household math Why templates matter
Homes needed to break the two-builder majority

One machine per home, log scale. White line: the ~106M people who own bitcoin directly. Network: 1,054 EH/s today.

The case for home hashrate

  1. Pools pick the payments

    Miners do the hashing, but whoever builds the block template chooses which transactions go into the block. For most of the network, that's the pool. Running a node checks the rules; it doesn't choose what goes in.

  2. Two companies pick for most blocks

    Foundry and the AntPool group build 58% of templates. If they're told to leave a payment out, it waits for someone else's block. Your bitcoin is in those payments.

  3. Home miners can take it back

    Build your own templates with DATUM, Stratum V2 job declaration or solo mining on your own node, and enough of you break that majority.

  4. It takes kilowatts, not trinkets

    That's about 164 EH/s: 821k homes with an S21, or 137M with a Bitaxe. Heat and solar make the big machines worth running.

Bitaxes teach. Kilowatts defend.

Pick a goal and a machine. Each home runs one machine. The answer is how many homes it takes, next to the roughly 106 million people who own bitcoin. Orange numbers change with live network data or with the controls you set.

1Pick a goal
2Pick a machine, one per home
3Network size1,054 EH/s · today
Homes needed
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A committed minorityfewer than 1 in 100 bitcoin owners
A broad movement1 in 100 to 1 in 10
A big share of bitcoiners1 in 10 to 1 in 4
Up to half of bitcoiners1 in 4 to 1 in 2
Most of bitcoinmore than half to every owner
More homes than ownerscan't happen
Real hashrate at homeDesk minersEach rivet on the dial is a machine. Click one to select it.
New home hashrate needed
164EH/s

Homes
820k

The fleet
Bitcoin owners per machine
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Total power draw
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Heat per home
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Censored payments

Suppose the big template builders are told to leave a payment out. It's still valid, every node relays it, and it sits in every mempool. It can only confirm in a block from someone else.

Today
61of 144 blocks a day
24 min average wait
With this home fleet on its own templates
—
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Bitaxes

Credit where it's due. skot (Skot9000) reverse-engineered Bitmain's mining chips and published the Bitaxe as open-source hardware. Every trace on the board and every line of firmware is public, and the OSMU community keeps building on it. There's no better way to learn how mining works.

But a classroom isn't a fleet. A Bitaxe draws about 18 W, so it can't heat a room, and mining solo it finds a block about once every 17,000 years. It isn't even the cheap option: a used S19j Pro sells for about $185 on eBay, roughly the price of a tabletop miner, and does 104 TH/s instead of 1 to 6.

→

Geography

Home mining protects against governments as well as pools, but only if it's spread out. China's 2021 ban cut network hashrate by 39% in two months. The US already holds the most hashrate, so a home fleet that's mostly American adds to that risk.

Largest country's share
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Countries that together hold over half
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Who builds the blocks

A block's coinbase tag says which pool got paid. It doesn't say who wrote the block template, the list of transactions miners are told to hash. Researcher b10c found strong evidence that a group of pools relay AntPool's templates under their own names. Group the blocks by who actually builds them and three entities become two.

Last 30 days · 4,479 blocks
50% of blocks
Companies building over half the blocks
3

Foundry, AntPool and F2Pool tags together.

One day of blocks (144), colored by tag

Template-builder grouping is an inference from matching merkle branches, transaction ordering and identical invalid jobs (b10c, mainnet.observer). Membership is assumed, not admitted. Braiins also offers Stratum V2 job declaration, and some of its hash may build its own templates. Tag shares from mempool.space; template shares from mainnet.observer, so the two sources differ by a few tenths. Both cover the last 30 days.

Mining setups

Who writes the template?

The pool's brand doesn't matter. What matters is whose node chooses the transactions your hash works on. Most industrial hash is paid FPPS, which leaves the template with the pool.

!

Why it matters: if the few companies that build most templates are told to leave certain payments out, those payments are still valid and still in every mempool. They just wait for a block from someone who builds their own template. Industrial miners rarely move. At Bitcoin 2024, an IREN representative said their hash went 50/50 to Foundry and AntPool and answered "I don't know" when asked what they'd do in a 51% event. For many industrial miners, mined bitcoin is inventory to sell for power bills and debt. Home miners hold theirs, so when payments start getting left out, theirs are the ones at stake. That's why they're the ones with a reason to act.

Heat and solar

A miner turns every watt into heat and pays you back in sats. In winter that heat replaces a heater you'd run anyway. With solar, it uses power you'd otherwise sell back for a few cents. Start from a setup and adjust it to your house.

Start from a setup

Assumes today's bitcoin price, a 2% pool fee, a heat pump that delivers 3 units of heat per unit of power, and 4¢ for solar sold back to the grid. A median 11.7 kW home array makes about 44 kWh on an average day.

Daily ledger
Hashrate
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Mined / day
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Power cost / day
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Net / day
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Heat output
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Homes like yours to break the majority
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Companies building home miners

Home mining only spreads when it comes in a box a normal person can buy, install and forget about. These teams are doing that work.

Canaan Avalon

The Nano 3S, Mini 3 and Avalon Q are home miners with quiet modes and app control, from 140 W desk units up to a 90 TH/s, 1.7 kW machine.

Heatbit

Mining space heaters with air purifiers built in, up to 60 TH/s in the Maxi Pro. A miner that looks like an appliance.

Hashrate House

Immersion tanks that heat a home's hot water, reusing the old water heater as the storage tank.

Exergy

Building hashrate heating for homes and businesses, including an OCEAN and DATUM integration for Home Assistant that tracks and controls miners from your own node.

Where hashrate is heading

Network hashrate grew tenfold between early 2020 and its October 2025 peak, then fell for nine months as bitcoin's price slid and public miners moved power to AI data centers. Pick a future and the table shows what changes for home miners. The rest of the page uses it too.

Network hashrate · monthly mean, EH/s · mempool.space
Scenario

Network hashrate
1,054EH/s
Compared with today
MeasureTodayScenarioChange

AI frees up share

When an industrial site switches to AI, its hash leaves the network and every home machine counts for more. In Morgan Stanley's middle case, about 14 of the ~20 GW of mining sites go to AI by 2028.

It doesn't fix templates

The hash that stays still mostly points at Foundry and the AntPool group. Industrial miners leaving doesn't change who builds templates for what remains.

Heat outlasts profit

Newer machines keep getting more efficient and difficulty keeps rising, so old gear earns less every year. Heat and solar are what keep a home miner worth running.

What you can do

Nobody needs to do all of it. A real share of bitcoiners each doing a part would do it.

  1. Learn on a Bitaxe

    Point it at your own node and watch it work. It's the cheapest classroom in mining: pools, templates and your own node, the same setup a big machine uses.

    See what it can and can't do
  2. Size a real machine to your house

    Pick one that replaces heat you already pay for, or soaks up solar you'd sell for a few cents. A used S19j Pro costs about what a tabletop miner does.

    Run your heat & solar numbers
  3. Build your own templates

    Mine through DATUM, Stratum V2 job declaration, or solo on your own node. Hashrate pointed at a big FPPS pool adds to the problem.

    Compare setups
  4. Spread it out

    Home hash in many countries is harder to pressure than home hash in one. Send this page to a bitcoiner somewhere else.

    See jurisdiction risk

Sources

Homes needed: new home hashrate also grows the network, so its share is H ÷ (network + H). Pushing a group that builds a share c of blocks under half takes H > (2c − 1) × network. Divide by one machine's hashrate to get homes. Censored payments: if builders with share c leave a payment out, about 144 × (1 − c) blocks a day can carry it, and it waits 10 ÷ (1 − c) minutes on average. This ignores fees and assumes independent builders include every valid payment. Mining income: block subsidy plus average fees, times the actual recent block rate, divided by network hashrate (mempool.space), which comes to about $38.62 per PH/s per day as of 20 Oct 2026. It's scaled by network size and subsidy in each scenario. Bitcoin owners: about 106 million people (Onramp, early 2026); blockchains record addresses, not people, so this is rough. Geography: Hashrate Index country estimates, Q1 2026. S19j Pro price: typical used asking price on eBay, 21 Oct 2026.