Coinbase CTO: Time May Be Right for Home Crypto Mining

That's why a notable pioneer in consumer bitcoin mining is backing a startup seeking to take another stab at popularizing at-home crypto mining, a business with a long history of abrupt ends for early entrants that includes some of the industry's best known busts.

Still, Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan is betting a new startup called Coinmine, which announced pre-orders for its first home miner on Wednesday, might be able to reverse this trend.

"The big difference with decentralized mining in 2018 is that there are now so many different coins and tokens out there that it's almost certainly possible to make a profit - or at least mine a decent amount of some crypto - via a decentralized home mining device like Coinmine."

No stranger to home mining, 21.co attempted to foster an ecosystem of home mining by building the 21 Bitcoin Computer, built both to mine and run bitcoin-based apps.

Despite his prior company's pivot away from mining, Srinivasan believes that crypto has changed in two substantial ways that make home mining more feasible in 2018 than 2015.

"Back in 2015 only bitcoin had any significant share, so the viability of any decentralized mining approach was benchmarked against BTC alone as opposed to 1,000-plus new digital assets," he said.

"The big difference with decentralized mining in 2018 is that there are now so many different coins and tokens out there that it's almost certainly possible to make a profit - or at least mine a decent amount of some crypto - via a decentralized home mining device like Coinmine," Srinivasan wrote.

As CEO Farbood Nivi explained to CoinDesk, Coinmine will automatically put users into mining pools.

Further, the company will take a 5 percent cut of users' earnings as they mine, according to a spokesperson for Coinmine.

"I believe that decentralized mining is an important idea and worth trying again. It's mining as Satoshi intended: many devices around the world with no single point of failure."