Interesting. A couple considerations to add from the perspective of planning:

• Depreciation could have a significant impact on the income test for trade/business versus hobby
• Another significant cost in the mining operation is the electricity, and when that gets tied into the home office web, it might make a lot of sense to try and limit depreciation deductions to insure positive taxable income (instead of risking creating a net hobby loss). To avoid tainting the electricity deduction is where I was going with that.
• Recent tax reform had some revisions to 179 and to bonus starting in late 2017 (I believe bonus is 100% now). Also, the original use requirement for bonus went away, so in theory bonus could be use on Ebay-ed mining equipment.

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