Somewhere far away from the Kenyan main roads, where the sounds of birds and the occasional dog drown the traffic noise, Kurt sits at an L-shaped desk in a small detached garage. He's trying to read a Bitcoin mining chip nobody outside its Chinese factory has ever publicly described.

One of the promises of Bitcoin is that it's transparent and open. The code is open-source, so you never have to take anyone's word for it. This is what the Bitcoin community means when they say "don't trust, verify." You can read the code, run a node, and confirm the rules for yourself. But the hardware that performs the computational work that keeps the system running remains mostly closed. Bitcoin miners arrive as sealed boxes from a few giant companies, most of them based in China, whose designs are proprietary and whose chips are inscrutable.

Kurt has been thinking about this problem from his garage in Nairobi, where he has been working on something small, stubborn, and strange: an open-source Bitcoin miner called Bitshoka Nini.

Its design files are open, and the board can be studied, copied, changed, and fabricated again. While the project is a clear underdog, it might yet change the status quo, or at least that's the hope. The struggle it represents isn't about beating industrial miners at their own scale. Rather, it's about knowledge, access, and who gets to understand the machines that keep Bitcoin running.

The Bitshoka project aimed to reverse engineer MicroBT's WhatsMiner chips and make them open-source, enabling solo mining and increasing decentralization in Africa.

...read more at opensats.org