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Kodak at CES Gets Even Weirder with a $3400 Bitcoin Mining Rental Scheme

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Remember a couple years ago when Kodak announced a cool new Super 8 camera and everyone thought it was great?

Today’s story is nothing like that.

Yesterday, Kodak announced a new cryptocurrency called KODAKCoin and a blockchain technology for licensing images called KODAKOne. Today, on the CES 2018 show floor, Kodak showed off its new Kodak KashMiner, which mines bitcoin.

Essentially, you pay $3400 to rent the Kodak KashMiner for two years. During that time, Kodak keeps 50% of the bitcoin revenue and Kodak estimates that you’ll receive $375 per month for a total USD equivalent payout of $9,000.

There are a number of problems with this scenario.

First, the Kodak KashMiner miner appears to be rebranded Bitmain Antminer S9, which retails for around $2400. So, Kodak is renting its KashMiner to you for $1000 more than you could buy it outright and have forever. This will likely put even more pressure on the supply and demand bottleneck right now since Antminer S9s are going for around $6,000 on the secondary market. Way to go Kodak.

https://twitter.com/Angry_Albert/status/951170685702782976

Second, Kodak’s calculations assume that the difficulty level of mining bitcoin stays the same, when the difficulty level has been increasing by about 15% per month. Accordingly, the anticipated mining revenue is way off over the course of those two years. And if the value of bitcoin drops from current, it’s an even worse deal.

I find the label at the top of the page “In Math We Trust” to be more than a little ironic. There are apparently already 80 contracts for Kodak KashMiner and another 300 units are on the way.

Kodak appears to have simply slapped a sticker on the side of the industry standard bitcoin miner and charged you $1000 more for a 2-year rental fee than you can buy one outright. For every eyebrow that may have been raised with interest in the earlier announcement of KODAKOne and KODAKCoin, this move undermines the legitimacy that Kodak could have for its blockchain technology.

If Kodak wanted to become a real player in the cryptocurrency and blockchain market, it could have blown the doors off CES by bringing in actual hardware to the US and helped the bottleneck in supply chain. Instead, Kodak looks like a total shill after a quick stock pump.

 

Kodak is Launching a New Cryptocurrency for Photographers

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Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have been exploding in recent months. Bitcoin’s price soared to over $20,000 in December, while other alt-coins rose in price and pushed the global cryptocurrency market cap over $750 billion.

I had a draft post in the hopper for Photography Bay a week and a half ago titled “How Blockchain Technology Could Affect Photography.” I have been digging into cryptocurrency and blockchain for a while now and was thinking forward about a licensing and ownership tracking method for photographs, along with a payment method for photographers. (There are over 1,000 crytpocurrencies in existence today across a wide range of industries and use cases.) Here sits the post in my trash file from when I put it there 9 days ago:

I kept hacking at the posted and ended up trashing it because I thought I was reaching too far and maybe it wasn’t all that relevant as a concept. As it turns out, Kodak was way ahead of me and I would’ve looked like a Nostradamus had I published that post a few days ago.

Kodak is officially moving into the crypto market with today’s announcement of the KODAKCoin, which is “a photo-centric cryptocurrency to empower photographers and agencies to take greater control in image rights management.” [Read more…]