Recently we wrote about the Kodak coin, a project that was meant to bring the blockchain technology into the world of photography, and in that article we mentioned a product called Kodak miner. This device was immediately marked as sketchy due to many red flags surrounding it and lo and behold, Spotlite USA – the company that was in charge of the Kodak miner project – yesterday announced that their project has collapsed.
Spotlite USA first showcased this product at the Consumer Electronics Show that was held in January in Las Vegas. The miners looked like basic Bitmain ASIC miners with Kodak stickers plastered on them. Spotlite CEO Halston Milkail apparently planned to rent out these miners – fully named Kodak KashMiners – to people who are willing to mine Bitcoin, at a price of $3400 USD for a two year period.
Back then Spotlite claimed that their KashMiner will be able to give users a return of at least $375 USD a month. This was immediately challenged by industry experts, who realized that 1. This puts KashMiner into a position of selling securities and 2. Their promise of steady returns was impossible to fulfill. Namely, people said that KashMiner will never be able to produce steady returns (mostly due to Bitcoin’s price fluctuation). Another point of contention was the fact that Bitcoin mining is becoming harder by the day, and this would also affect your mining returns down the line. Chris Hoffman summed up their plan nicely:
“Kodak is selling a Bitcoin miner where you pay for a two year contract and “make a profit”. (*at current prices, Kodak gets half of all bitcoin you produce.) This is the dumbest shit I’ve ever seen at CES.”
And experts weren’t the only ones who saw this as fraudulent. Mikail reported yesterday that his company was officially notified by the SEC to stop their “subscription service” from moving ahead. He went on to say that the project isn’t dead; his plan is apparently to install the mining rigs in Iceland (which has been a known location for miners for a while now).
Official spokespeople of KodakOne, subsection of Kodak responsible for the KodakCoin, immediately responded to press inquiries regarding the issue, confirming that the company had no official relation with Spotlite or its product.
