Coinmine, a start-up backed by Coinbase has launched a trendy and power-friendly device for home mining of cryptocurrency at a price tag of $799.
The Rise of Crypto Mining
As Bitcoin and cryptocurrency prices shot up last year, so did the public interest in mining them. An entire industry of hardware manufacturers, cloud mining companies and masternode hosting services have come up.
A few years back one could mine Bitcoin using desktops and laptops. As the competition and mining difficulty increased, specialized chips called ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) chips were designed making mining impossible by CPU (Central Processing Unit) or GPU (Graphical Processing Unit) based devices.
Coinmine, a start-up firm has launched “Coinmine One”, a compact and trendy looking mining device, which as per company claims, is easy to use and can be controlled with an app.
The development was reported earlier by Fortune. According to the article, the device costs $799. While interested customers can place their orders on the company’s website, shipping is scheduled to start in December.
Founders
The firm was founded by Farb Nivi, an entrepreneur and Justin Lambert, an industrial designer. The company has raised $2 million in funding from Coinbase Ventures, Arrington Ventures and Balaji Srinivasan, chief technology officer at Coinbase.
Nivi wants to target crypto-enthusiasts and believes that it will help them participate in new blockchain projects. Balaji thinks that the device provides an opportunity to make money.
Nivi said:
It’s a pretty cool idea to be able to plug a device into the wall that makes money for you while you sleep. As a purely economic proposition, you’d have to balance the cost of power and the hardware device itself with the cost of the coin or token that you’d be mining. There are so many assets now that there is probably always an arbitrage somewhere.
Nivi also believes that more blockchains will follow Monero, which recently updated its protocol to disallow mining using ASIC based devices. That would allow more participation in the mining process and keep the cryptocurrency decentralized.
Device Details
The Coinmine One uses GPU chips and is not powerful enough to mine Bitcoin. However, the cryptocurrencies that can currently be mined using the device include Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Monero, and Zcash.
The mining device runs its own operating system that will enable the users to add more cryptocurrencies in the future. According to Nivi, the device is power-efficient and very quiet. It also has a trendy design.
Using Coinmine One will allow the users to earn the currently supported cryptocurrencies and switch to mining new currencies in the future rather than having to buy them.
The device stores the mined assets in wallets on its corporate servers and deducts a 5% cut for providing the service.
“With automatic updates, MineOS also gives access to new crypto networks like Bitcoin Lightning, Grin, Dfinity, and Filecoin. This feature ensures users do not miss out on powering the next important crypto network,” said the company in a press release.
As cryptocurrency adoption increases and they gradually go mainstream, more firms like Coinmine will mushroom giving users alternate options to mine and earn digital assets.
Would you like to buy the Coinmine One? Let us know in the comments below.
Images courtesy of ShutterStock
