US SEC halts a company's crypto mining machine leasing plan

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has halted Spotlite’s Kodak KashMiner mining plan, which was demonstrated at this year’s CES technology show. The company said it would no longer rent out the mining machines it provided.

Spotlite plans to lease this bitcoin-focused Kodak KashMiner (and other cryptocurrencies) for two years for $3,400, and consumers will receive half of the mining proceeds. Spotlite says in its marketing that the machine will generate $375 in value per month, or $9,000 in two years at an average bitcoin price of $14,000. However, this ignores the fundamentals of bitcoin, in this case, that it becomes more difficult and time-consuming to mine as bitcoins are generated, and ignores the wildly volatile market.

One economics professor said the price of Bitcoin would need to be around $28,000 to provide Spotlite's suggested rate of return; the current value is $6,597, less than a quarter of that. Bitcoin's all-time high of $19,783 was set in December. The price of Bitcoin only rose above $14,000 for a few weeks in December and January. So actually getting a return seems extremely unlikely.