28 July 2025
Bitcoin Magazine
How FutureBit is Revolutionizing Bitcoin Mining At Home
Rocking 10 terahash per second on their Apollo II device, with a dedicated Linux computer and 2 terabytes of storage, the FutureBit line of Bitcoin home miners stands out in the market as a well-rounded tool for the sovereign Bitcoiner. Bitcoin mining at home has never been easier.
Apollo I (or Apollo BTC), the first home miner device by FutureBit, launched in 2017, and was designed to maximize mining decentralization. “We started the company around 2014 when Bitcoin mining became too difficult to do at home. Mining machines went from 500-600-watt devices to 220-volt, multi-thousand-watt units, cutting off the home mining market,” John Stefanopoulos, founder and CEO of FutureBit, told Bitcoin Magazine.
Featuring 2-3 TH/s of hashing power, 6 CPU cores and enough memory to run a full Bitcoin node at the time, the Apollo I launched FutureBit into the race to produce the optimal home miner and a Bitcoin dedicated computer.
Today, FutureBit is regularly out of stock for the Apollo II, having sold over 100,000 devices since the company’s inception, with hints of an Apollo III in active development. The guiding design goal for the company is to create hardware dedicated to Bitcoiners who want “full citizenship rights” on the Bitcoin network, a vision that can only be achieved by running a full node and having sufficient hashing power.
To date, multiple blocks have been found by Apollo “solo miners” a term that refers to individuals mining a Bitcoin block entirely on their own rather than pooling their hashrate with other miners to improve their odds. There’s been a few reported instances of successful solo mining with the winners taking home a full block reward of over 3.125 BTC, in recent years.
Full Bitcoin Citizenship Rights
The guiding vision of FutureBit is both simple and ambitious. It echoes Satoshi’s original Bitcoin design, where every copy of its blockchain or node was also meant to be a Bitcoin miner, producing hashing power and voting cryptographically on the state of the network. This arrangement worked for a time in the early days of the network, when mining bitcoin at home was the norm rather than the exception. When mining became competitive enough, it evolved to dedicated hashing hardware — like the ASICs — and not long after it became industrial, demanding more space, lower energy costs and as a result moving out of the retail home environment. The invention of mining pools also separated the Bitcoin node from the process of mining, outsourcing the node operations to a third party so miners could focus on just maximizing hashrate. These mining pools are the norm today and are responsible for assembling transactions into a block and distributing the mining rewards.
While Satoshi’s design and vision for Bitcoin mining at home wasn’t perfect — after all, home mining is not viable today as a pure for-profit venture — the ideal is still worth pursuing, especially when considering other benefits granted to users by the original design.
In a market with sophisticated mobile and hardware wallets of various kinds, with teams of engineers dedicated to maximizing ease of use and security, it is easy to use Bitcoin regularly without using its essential infrastructure, without participating in the production of blocks, and without participating in the settlement or distribution of transactions. That’s by design. Most people can not be expected to run a full Bitcoin node or do home mining; As an industry, we have little choice but to wean the public into financial sovereignty, and that is if they choose to take it.
Nevertheless, for those rugged individualists, those with a frontier mindset, those who are willing and able to pay a premium for privacy and to have a say in the security to the network are increasingly interested home mining devices that can run the full Bitcoin stack.
One obvious nonmonetary benefit of running a full node at home is that, as a user, you do not need to ask third parties what your balance is. Currently, mobile wallets use various protocols to query wallet app providers about their balance. While you can make that reasonably secure, at the end of the day, users are sending their public keys over the internet to query a third-party database and return a balance. Even in cases where multiple servers are asked at random, and via anonymized methods (some Electrum servers), the principle is the same: The only solution is to run a full copy of Bitcoin at home.
When you add hashing power to the equation, new doors of potential bottom-up governance begin to emerge. While it is certainly difficult to run a for-profit competitive Bitcoin mining operation, an endeavor that is a full time job for most. One can imagine a world where pools of like-minded individuals organize into coalitions — akin to the labor movements of the early 1900’s century — to defend their shared interests and get their transactions mined — not by state force but by proof of work. They don’t have to win blocks regularly, just often enough to be viable. This ideal is increasingly proven by pools like Ocean pool who’s hashrate only continues to go up.
A coalition of home miners, for example, might run a CoinJoin pool, waiting patiently to win a block, only to mix their own coins with the block reward, thus gaining a remarkable privacy bonus. The block reward would offset the various costs of home mining, making the effort potentially worth it. Home mining in the hands of a more curious and experienced Bitcoiner may as a result unlock a new wave of mining pool innovations.
Decentralizing the Network: Bitcoin Mining at Home
Commenting on the vision to reunite mining and a full node in the hands of consumers, Stefanopoulos noted that they “were the first to bundle a Bitcoin node and miner with an easy-to-use UI, allowing mining to a personal node.” The Apollo machines can run a full Linux operating system, a fork of Ubuntu that can host a wide range of fully capable wallets like Sparrow.
While the personal benefits of running a full node are clear and home mining both educates and provides an enticing chance to earn bitcoin via mining pools or solo mining, the resulting benefits to the Bitcoin network as a whole are also core to FutureBit’s mission.
Decentralizing Bitcoin mining is a complicated topic: On the one hand, how centralized the mining network is remains debatable, but without a doubt, various areas are in need of improvement.
Physical decentralization would mean high amounts of hashing power distributed geographically throughout the world. The more individuals that can contribute significant hashrate to the network, the better. Jurisdictional decentralization follows; for roughly half a decade, over half Bitcoin’s hashrate was estimated to come from China. While no attacks on the network at a protocol level were explicit, this dynamic played a concerning role during the Bitcoin fork wars, a majority of the hashrate at one point signaling support for the version of Bitcoin that eventually lost that culture war.
It is likely that over 50% of the Bitcoin hashrate is in the United States today, and while a much different environment than China, politically speaking, it nevertheless raises some concerns. While the separation of powers in the U.S. and the significant independence between states and the federal government might be enough to slow down or deter proof-of-work attacks on the Bitcoin network, it would be preferable for hashrate to be widely distributed geographically — ideally in the hands of civilian end users throughout the whole world.
Mining pools present another set of centralization concerns, primarily around the production of block templates. Mining pools run a node for all hashrate contributors and usually assemble the blocks and transactions therein, publishing it to the network when one of their hashers mine a block. How exactly these templates are produced is another vector of centralization: Many public mining pools apparently mirror how Antpool produces blocks. The result is that while in theory they are different entities, for all practical purposes, they function as one — without block template diversity.
This is one of the key reasons why Ocean pool has gathered so much support, and one important way in which end users of Bitcoin can influence the shape of the network, by contributing their home mining hashrate to pools that don’t just copy-paste a major pool’s block templates.
To Stefanopoulos, this is the most critical form of Bitcoin mining centralization, and a key motivation for his development of FutureBit. According to him, “The biggest threat is block template centralization, where five pools decide transactions. This risks regulatory capture, like governments forcing pools to censor transactions.”
He added that, “When an individual runs a full node and mines, any transaction in the mempool gets included in their block, ensuring decentralization.”
This post How FutureBit is Revolutionizing Bitcoin Mining At Home first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.