The $799 Coinmine One Will Look Like an Xbox and Mint Crypto Money

Try as startups might, crypto mining hasn't yet had an everyman device.

Announced Wednesday, the startup is revealing its first product, the Coinmine One, a hardware device aimed at crypto enthusiasts who'd like to earn rewards for mining blockchains - without the need to learn a new technical skill set.

For $799, the Coinmine One will sport a miner that can generate any one of the following out of the box: ether at 29 Mh/sec, monero at 900 h/sec, zcash at 320 h/sec and ether classic.

If the company is right and consumers love it, don't look for today's mining hobbyists to agree.

Garza's company, GAWMiners, first made its mark by reselling imported mining equipment, and later expanded its business by hosting miners and then, later, offering so-called "Virtual miners" that were later deemed securities.

ASIC miners look like enormous shoe boxes with a fan in a cage stuck to one end, like something that really doesn't belong anywhere but a garage.

The prior generation of miners look like companies took their pro versions and scaled them down a bit in price, noise and voltage, without fundamentally rethinking the design or user experience.

The evolution of miners from home-based enthusiasts to industrial-scale behemoths highlights the fundamental business model of a miner: a kind of arbitrage where profits are made when the cost of energy is lower than the return on the cryptocurrencies mined and sold.

One danger some users might foresee is that lots of people will buy it making the tokens it mines less lucrative for each miner.

Normally, in discussion of mining equipment, users calculate how long it will take them to recoup their capital expenditure in fiat from earnings in crypto.