In regards to the general sentiment that Bitaxes are doing jack shit to secure the network, this misses the point. The nominal hashrate is low, the cost per terahash is high, overall these are obviously prohibitive to scaling and competition so pointing these things out without further thought is shallow IMO. The important breakthrough Bitaxe brought was that it was the first open-source Bitcoin mining hardware. The Bitaxe was the first step in severing reliance on Bitmain hardware. In the coming weeks you will see a Bitaxe released using the Intel BZM2 chip, after that the Auradine chip, and eventually the Block chip. In addition to these Bitaxes, by May we will be releasing a validated ~100 Watt hashboard called Ember One. Again, the first one has the Bitmain chips because we had to start with something but soon there after will be Intel, Auradine, & Block designs. So we started with a single chip in the Bitaxe, the Ember One has 12 chips, the next miners will have more and this will continue until there is an open-source alternative to Bitmain miners that actually does compete in cost per terahash and nominal hashrate and there will be multiple chip versions to choose from. That is why the Bitaxe was important. - @econoalchemist