Meet Honeyminer: The App That Lets You Earn Bitcoin With a Laptop Again

New mining software promises to let almost anyone earn small amounts of bitcoin with a Windows laptop, giving users a taste of the cryptocurrency's early days.

Revealed exclusively to CoinDesk, the New Jersey-based crypto mining startup Honeyminer quietly launched a free beta in June and has already garnered 10,000 downloads across the globe.

Honeyminer allows users to participate in a dynamic mining pool by running the app when the computer's graphics processing unit isn't in use processing images or videos.

"The miner doesn't have to do the math or manage all the configurations and settings, or manually check the prices," Honeyminer advisor Noah Jessop, a venture capitalist at Founder Collective in San Francisco, told CoinDesk.

To be sure, this isn't the most profitable way to mine cryptocurrency, given broader market volatility compared to bitcoin and Honeyminer's cut, ranging from 2.5 percent to 8 percent depending on the quality of the user's hardware.

Honeyminer's software was, in part, inspired by the controversies that surround bitcoin mining.

Namely, the way many users of the software feel the China-based hardware provider Bitmain has achieved a near-monopoly on mining equipment and how a similar small number of firms control the majority of mining pools.

"As we've watched in bitcoin proper, the arms race escalates to this custom hardware and then people who have access to the best silicon tabs are the people who control mining," Jessop said.

Plus, the app's algorithm can also help miners with professional mining rigs as well.

A specialized version called Honeyminer Pro is in the works for professional miners who need help with power consumption management and options for manually choosing which cryptos to mine, so they're not restricted to whatever's most profitable, or which coins to cash out in, in case they don't want bitcoin.