Every December the same small tragedy plays out in wallets and kitchen drawers across the world. Somebody buys a gift card. Somebody receives it. The card sits half-used or entirely forgotten until it is worth nothing to anyone. Americans alone leave about $23 billion of gift card value unspent every year, a tenth of the $234 billion they buy. It is the most popular present in the country and also the one most likely to end up as nothing. The gift card industry has never solved that problem because, in a sense, breakage is part of the business model.
GoMining, the Cyprus-based Bitcoin mining company that serves more than 5.5 million users, is now selling a present that cannot go unused in that way. GoMining Gifts, launched on 11 September, lets anyone buy a digital Bitcoin miner, attach a card and a personal message and send the whole thing as a single link. The person on the other end opens the link, presses one button and the miner begins directing Bitcoin rewards to their GoMining account from that moment on. There is no separate wallet to configure, no seed phrase to store, no exchange account to open first. If the recipient already uses the GoMining app the miner attaches to their existing account; if they do not, the account is created during activation. The buyer pays once. The miner keeps working.
What has actually been built
The product is simple to describe because the complexity has been pushed out of sight. A GoMining digital miner is a tokenized slice of real mining hardware that the company runs in data centres in the United States and internationally. It is measured in the same two numbers that describe a physical mining rig: hashrate in terahashes per second and efficiency in watts per terahash. GoMining Gifts offers eight tiers, all issued at 12 W/TH, running from a 1 TH miner called Atom to a 155 TH miner called Infinitum. The gifting layer wraps that miner in the things people actually want when they give a present: a design, a greeting, a message and a delivery mechanism that works through whatever messaging app the recipient already uses.
Two rules define the offer. The first is that the gift is paid for in full at purchase and then belongs to the recipient outright, which means the giver never gets a renewal bill and the recipient never has to decide whether to keep paying. The second is that a purchase can be refunded in full within 30 days as long as the gift has not been activated, which removes the risk of buying for someone who turns out not to want it. Once activated, the recipient can track mining activity and their BTC balance in real time inside the app and withdraw funds whenever they choose. GoMining is explicit that rewards move with network difficulty, the Bitcoin price and maintenance costs, so the present is a working asset rather than a fixed sum. Availability follows local rules in each market.
The gifting economy has a leakage problem
To see why this design matters, it helps to look at the market GoMining is walking into. US gift card sales have climbed almost every year for fifteen years, from $91 billion in 2010 to a projected $234 billion in 2025 according to WalletHub, with the single dip coming in the 2020 pandemic year. That growth has come with a cost that the industry rarely advertises. Capital One Shopping’s research puts the annual unused balance at $23 billion. The same research finds that consumers who do redeem a card overspend it by an average of $108, which tells you the product mostly works as a coupon for the retailer rather than as a store of value for the recipient. The card is a promise to spend, not a thing that is owned.
A digital miner inverts that logic. Because the recipient owns the miner itself rather than a balance at one merchant, there is nothing to forget and nothing to expire. The value does not sit waiting to be spent at a particular shop; it accrues, day by day, into a Bitcoin balance the recipient controls. GoMining is not the first company to notice that a gift which produces something beats a gift which is consumed, but it is the first to package a working slice of the Bitcoin network in the same one-link format that people already use for e-gift cards.
The wish list changed while nobody was looking
The demand side has moved faster than most gift retailers realise. In December 2021 a BlockFi survey found that about one in ten Americans were gifting crypto for the holidays and that fewer than a quarter even knew how to do it. Four years later the picture is unrecognisable. A Harris Poll for the National Cryptocurrency Association and PayPal in October 2025 found that 24 per cent of Americans had given or were considering giving crypto that season, that 17 per cent would rather receive crypto than a gift card and that 31 per cent believed a crypto gift was less likely to go unused. Among adults aged 18 to 54, 22 per cent planned to gift crypto within twelve months and 41 per cent said they would be excited to receive it.
The two surveys that arrived in the weeks after that painted the same picture from different angles. Visa’s 2025 holiday survey, run by Morning Consult, found that 45 per cent of Gen Z shoppers wanted crypto as a gift and that 28 per cent of all shoppers would be excited to receive it. Fold’s Holiday Bitcoin Gifting Outlook, published in December, found that 60 per cent of consumers were interested in gifting bitcoin specifically and that 62 per cent already trusted the crypto gift cards on the market. The reasons people gave are the ones a gift-card designer would kill for: 58 per cent cited the potential to increase in value, 54 per cent the flexibility to spend or invest, 49 per cent the fact that it cannot be lost or expire. Every one of those reasons applies with more force to a miner than to a fixed amount of coin, because a miner is the machine that produces the coin.
What had been missing was the delivery format. A survey respondent who says they would like to give bitcoin still has to work out how. Until now the honest answer involved either sending coins to a wallet the recipient did not have or buying a gift card that redeems for a one-off balance. GoMining Gifts collapses that into the format everybody already understands: a link, a card, a message and a button.
What the recipient is actually holding
It is worth being clear about what a 1 TH miner is, because the number is small and the thing behind it is not. The Bitcoin network is secured by computing power measured in hashes per second. The total has grown from 100 exahashes per second in September 2019 to a first crossing of 1,000 EH/s in September 2025, a peak of about 1,157 EH/s in October 2025 and a snapshot of roughly 1,001 EH/s on 4 September 2026. One exahash is a million terahashes. Since the April 2024 halving the network has issued 3.125 BTC per block, about 450 new bitcoin a day. Every terahash of honest hashrate earns a proportional claim on that issuance plus transaction fees, less the cost of running the machine.
GoMining’s fleet is the red line on that chart. It has been growing faster than the network. The company reported 7.5 million TH across roughly 350 megawatts of capacity in early 2025, 10.7 million TH and 4.5 million users by the European Blockchain Convention in October 2025 and about 16.3 million TH with more than five million users by August 2026, at which point holders of its digital miners had collectively earned more than 5,800 BTC. That fleet is what puts the company among the ten largest Bitcoin mining entities by hashrate. When somebody gives an Atom, they are giving one terahash of that 16 million, which is a tiny fraction of a very large machine, but it is a real fraction of a real machine, with real hardware behind it that GoMining maintains and powers on the recipient’s behalf.
Reading the price list
The eight tiers are the clearest window into how the product has been priced. On the August snapshot of the gifts site, an Atom at 1 TH listed at $16.99 and an Infinitum at 155 TH listed at $2,516, with Crystal, Comet, Terra, Solaris, Galaxy and Cosmos filling the ladder at 3, 6, 12, 24, 43 and 76 TH. GoMining’s launch materials give the current range as under $20 for Atom and over $2,800 for Infinitum, with prices subject to change, so the exact figures move with the market. What does not move is the shape of the ladder: the price per terahash runs from about $17 at the bottom to about $16 at the top, which means a buyer pays almost exactly the same for each unit of mining power whether they are spending twenty dollars or two and a half thousand, with a small discount for scale.
That flat pricing is a deliberate choice. It is a sensible one for a gift product. It means the tiers are a sizing decision rather than a value-hunting exercise: a small gesture, a birthday, a wedding or a housewarming each map to a different rung without the buyer having to work out where the bargain is. The 12 W/TH efficiency across all eight tiers matters for the same reason, because efficiency is what determines how much of a miner’s gross reward survives its electricity and maintenance costs. GoMining has put every gift on the same footing rather than reserving the better hardware for the larger purchases.
The company’s own framing of rewards is careful. It deserves to be read carefully in turn. The Bitcoin a miner produces depends on how much of the network’s total hashrate it represents, on the price of Bitcoin and on the maintenance charge deducted for power and upkeep. All three change. What the recipient receives is not a fixed amount of coin but a working stake in the network’s output, tracked daily in the app and withdrawable at any time. For a gift, that is closer to giving somebody a small orchard than a basket of fruit. The right way to present it is as exactly that.
Why this product was always going to come from GoMining
GoMining has been circling the idea of a miner as a present for some time. In January it paired with Jacob & Co. on a $40,000 limited-edition watch that came with a 1,000 TH digital miner, which was a gift at the very top of the market. Every holder of a GoMining Card receives a free 1 TH Gift Miner on issuance, which was the idea at the very bottom. GoMining Gifts fills the range between. It fits an ecosystem that has been built so that a miner is the entry point rather than the whole story. Rewards can be spent through the GoMining Card wherever bank cards are accepted, grown through Simple Earn, which this week began paying yield directly as mining power, borrowed against through Instant Funds without selling the underlying Bitcoin, or put to competitive use in Miner Wars, where clans compete for BTC and GOMINING token rewards.
That matters for the gift because a present is only as good as what the recipient can do with it the morning after. A person who receives an Atom can watch it work, can add to it, can upgrade it, can spend what it earns or can leave it alone. Each of those paths already exists inside the same app the gift activated. The company’s growth from about 3.4 million registered users in early 2025 to more than 5.5 million today has come almost entirely from retail buyers making that first small purchase. A gift is the most natural way anyone has yet found to put that first purchase in somebody else’s hands.
The market it grows into
The gifting economy is large and still growing. ResearchAndMarkets puts the global gift card market at $603 billion in 2025, rising to about $865 billion by 2030, after compounding at 8.2 per cent a year since 2021. Within that, digital delivery is where the growth is concentrated. A link that carries a miner, a card and a message travels through exactly the same channels as an e-gift card: a text thread, an email, a chat app. GoMining does not need people to change how they give in order to give this.
The interesting question is not whether crypto gifts take a share of that market, since the surveys above suggest they already have, but what kind of crypto gift wins. A fixed amount of coin is a snapshot; it is worth what it is worth on the day it is opened. A miner is a process; it is still producing on the recipient’s next birthday. If the appeal of a crypto gift is, as 58 per cent of the NCA’s respondents said, the potential to grow in value, then the version that keeps adding to itself has a structural advantage over the version that does not. GoMining is the only one of the ten largest mining operations that sells its hashrate one terahash at a time to the public.
What to watch
Three things will show whether GoMining Gifts becomes a category rather than a feature. The first is the holiday season, because the surveys that show 60 per cent interest were all taken in the run-up to December and the product has arrived with three months to reach the people who answered them. The second is activation behaviour, since the whole design rests on a one-button link that removes the friction that has kept crypto gifting at the level of intent. The share of sent gifts that get activated within the 30-day window will say more than any survey. The third is what recipients do next, because a gift that turns into an upgrade, a card or a Simple Earn deposit is a customer acquired for the cost of a greeting card. That is the economics that would make the platform worth far more to GoMining than the gifts themselves.
The plain read is that GoMining has taken the two things it already does well, running a top-ten mining fleet and selling slices of it to five and a half million retail users. It has pointed them at the largest and leakiest gift market in the world. A gift card is a promise that expires. A digital miner is a small machine that does not. The company is wagering that people would rather give the second. The surveys, the price list and the network behind it suggest the wager is better placed than it might first appear.
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Vested Interest Disclosure: HackerNoon has reviewed the report for quality, but the claims herein belong to the author. #DYOR.