FutureBit’s Apollo III Bitcoin Miner Hits Micro Center Shelves in Its First Brick-and-Mortar Launch

FutureBit is putting its Apollo III Full Node on sale Friday at four Micro Center stores, the first time customers can walk into a shop and take home one of the Brooklyn company’s bitcoin miners.

The compact home miner, which also runs a full bitcoin node, will be sold in Brooklyn, Miami, Tustin, California, and Austin, Texas, as those stores open Friday, FutureBit said in a release. The four-store launch coincides with the grand opening of Micro Center’s new Austin store, the chain’s 31st U.S. location and its third in Texas.

Customers will also be able to reserve a unit online for in-store pickup, the company said. It did not say how many units each store has in stock, or what Micro Center is charging for them.

Until now, buyers in North America had to order the machine from FutureBit’s website, where the company says units are in stock and ship in two to three days. Putting it on a computer-store shelf lets a customer look at the hardware, ask how it works and carry it out the same day.

“When we started FutureBit, we made weekly trips to the DIY electronics section at the Brooklyn Micro Center to buy parts,” said John Stefanopoulos, founder of FutureBit. “On Friday, someone can walk into that same store, ask how Bitcoin mining works and take home a miner we designed just down the street. We couldn’t be more excited to work with Micro Center on our first physical store launch.”

A 6-inch miner that also runs a full node

FutureBit’s own shop lists the Apollo III Full Node at $1,099.99 without a storage drive, $1,299.99 with 1 terabyte of SSD storage and $1,399.99 with 2 terabytes. A cheaper, miner-only “Standard” model starts at $899.99 but does not include the full node.

The Full Node is rated at up to 18 terahashes per second in Turbo mode, at about 325 watts. In Eco mode, it is listed at about 12 TH/s and 150 watts, with noise under 35 decibels. A Super Eco mode is listed at about 8 TH/s and 80 watts. Power can be adjusted from 50 to 400 watts, and Turbo mode is much louder, at about 55 decibels. Those power figures are measured at the board and can vary by 10%, the product page says.

The unit is a 6.5-by-6.5-by-6-inch cube that weighs 6.5 pounds, comes with a one-year limited warranty and is assembled in the United States. It uses new 3-nanometer, American-designed chips, a custom controller and 8 GB of memory, and it includes a built-in solo mining pool. Buyers can also point the miner at a standard bitcoin mining pool. FutureBit says the full node and solo-mining features require an SSD, which is not included in the $1,099.99 configuration.

Home mining is not a profit play

Bitcoin Magazine covered the Apollo III’s debut in February, when FutureBit introduced the hardware as a way for individuals to run both a miner and a node at home. The point, the company has long argued, is not to compete with industrial mines on cost.

A single Apollo III at 18 TH/s is a sliver of the bitcoin network. A home-scale setup in that range still faces expected times to a solo block measured in centuries at recent difficulty, Bitcoin Magazine previously noted. Even so, a miner running through FutureBit’s Apollo Solo setup found block 973,262 on Oct. 26 and collected the full 3.154 bitcoin reward.

FutureBit, based in Brooklyn, has built consumer mining hardware since 2015. Stefanopoulos has framed store shelves as a way to put more hash rate and more nodes in living rooms. The company did not say whether the Micro Center test will expand beyond the four stores that began selling the Apollo III on Friday.