// blog · · by Nathan Baldwin
// On June 15, 2026, a single Bitaxe found a real DigiByte block at height 17,623,815. A Bitaxe is a SHA-256 miner, not a Bitcoin-only miner — here's why solo-mining an altcoin gives you genuinely better odds, and how to point yours at one.
This morning, a Bitaxe found a block.
Not Bitcoin — a single Gamma-class board won’t beat the entire Bitcoin network in your lifetime. It found a DigiByte block, at height 17,623,815, at 11:16 AM on June 15, 2026, with a best share difficulty of 1.18T. One small miner on a home network, solo, against the odds — and it hit. Bitaxe Baller’s new block-found celebration lit up the dashboard with confetti the instant the device’s blockFound counter ticked.
That’s not a hypothetical. It happened. And it’s the clearest possible illustration of something a lot of Bitaxe owners don’t realize: your miner doesn’t have to lose the Bitcoin lottery forever. It can go win a smaller one.
The BM1370 chip computes SHA-256 double hashes. It has no idea what coin those hashes are for. Every chain that secures itself with SHA-256d is fair game on the exact same hardware: Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, eCash, DigiByte, and Namecoin (via merged mining). Point your stratum config at the right pool and the same board that’s been quietly losing the Bitcoin lottery can mine any of them.
DigiByte is the perfect example of why this works. It uses MultiAlgo mining — five independent algorithms (SHA-256d, Scrypt, Skein, Qubit, and Odocrypt), each targeting roughly one-fifth of blocks, with 15-second block times. The practical consequence: the SHA-256d slice of DigiByte’s network is a small fraction of one already-modest network. A single Bitaxe represents a far bigger share of that slice than it ever could of Bitcoin’s hundreds of exahashes.
Your odds of solving a block are your hashrate divided by the network’s hashrate on your algorithm. On Bitcoin, that ratio is a rounding error. On the SHA-256d slice of DigiByte, it’s small but real — small enough that “a Bitaxe found one today” is a sentence we can actually write.
| Chain | Ticker | Why a Bitaxe owner might point here |
|---|---|---|
| DigiByte | DGB | MultiAlgo — SHA-256d is ~1/5 of an already-small network. Genuinely winnable. |
| Bitcoin Cash | BCH | Largest SHA-256d alt; meaningfully better solo odds than BTC |
| Bitcoin SV | BSV | Smaller network, SHA-256d, similar appeal |
| eCash | XEC | Avalanche-finality chain, SHA-256d PoW, small network |
| Namecoin | NMC | Merge-mined with BTC — secured by Bitcoin hashrate, niche but historic |
The tradeoff is honest: a DigiByte block is worth a fraction of a Bitcoin block in dollar terms. Solo-mining an alt is a bet that finding something occasionally beats finding nothing for a millennium — plus, for a lot of people, the simple satisfaction of putting real proof-of-work behind a chain they believe in. This isn’t financial advice. It’s about understanding what the hardware can do.
The mechanics are the same as any pool change.
letsmine.it and others; each SHA-256d chain has its own pools.dgb1... (bech32); a BCH address with bitcoincash:; an eCash address with ecash:. That address is how a solo pool pays you when you hit a block.A note that trips people up: addresses are chain-specific. Always use a fresh receiving address from a wallet that supports the exact chain you’re mining — a Bitcoin address is not a DigiByte address.
Two features made today’s win visible, both free for everyone.
Coin-aware Solo Block Probability. The widget on every device’s detail page detects which chain you’re actually mining and reports that chain’s real numbers — network difficulty, block reward, USD price, and your daily / monthly / yearly “1 in X” odds. Detection reads your payout-address prefix first because it’s unambiguous: dgb1... means DigiByte, bitcoincash: means BCH, ecash: means XEC. As of v1.16 the pool detector also recognizes the major DGB and XEC pools by URL (letsmine, digihash, dgbpool, weminemore, xeggex, viabtc) so a board pointed at us1.letsmine.it for DigiByte is correctly grouped as DGB instead of getting lumped in with Bitcoin.
Block-found celebration. New in v1.16: the dashboard watches each device’s blockFound counter on every 5-second poll and throws a full-viewport confetti overlay the instant it increments. It’s how we knew, in real time, that Bitaxe_004 had just hit. It survives reload, catches up if your device was offline when it happened, and persists to a local trophy shelf. Free for everyone — this is delight, not a paywall.
A Bitaxe found a real block today. Not on Bitcoin, where the math says wait a few thousand years — on DigiByte, where the math says it’s a long shot but a real one. If you’ve got a Bitaxe quietly losing the Bitcoin lottery, you have a choice: keep playing the longest odds in crypto, or point it at a smaller SHA-256d chain where “today’s the day” is a sentence that can actually come true.
Switch your pool, set your address, and let the odds widget show you exactly what you’re playing for. Maybe the next confetti screen is yours.
Try it yourself: Bitaxe Baller is a free desktop app for Mac and Windows. The coin-aware Solo Block Probability widget detects BTC, BCH, BSV, eCash, DigiByte, and Namecoin automatically, and the block-found celebration makes sure you never miss the moment. Open source on GitHub.