It sounds like a marketer got a little too excited and decided to name their developer kit <i>The 21 Bitcoin Computer</i>, not realizing the confusion they were about to create.<p>My understanding is that 21 has created a board that fits on top of a Raspberry Pi 2 to offer a miner, full bitcoin node, wallet, some fancy hardware acceleration, and several development tools for engineers who are new to bitcoin and want to experiment with building products on top of it.<p>It's only been an hour since all this news is coming out but so far I think they're completely missing their target audience by dumbing down their marketing material and selling preorders through Amazon.
I met a few people from 21 in Potrero Hill at a coffee stand. When one of them paid, I saw a bitcoin address and it struck up a conversation. I told them I was interested in new things (and bitcoin as well), and they told me that their startup is in stealth and they couldn't divulge any information about it, but could send me a test to see if I had the right skills to continue the process.<p>It was a multiple-choice test on HackerRank. It was all pretty simple stuff related to general linux/bash/html/sql knowledge tons of questions about bitcoin protocol. Having spent a few hack days in the past on it, i did extremely well and went on to interview with the CEO.<p>It started to get funny, the CEO would only interview a candidate at 10pm on a Thursday. "pretty busy during the daytime" they said.<p>Despite the red flag, I did it. We talked about bitcoin for about 40 minutes straight and why I was into it. I got the impression from them that they were onto something really huge, or that they think they are onto something really huge that is going to massively flop. At the end of the call, I asked for any hint into what the product I'm interviewing for does and was told it had to do with hardware.<p>I feel like I got off the call pretty bewildered.<p>Glad this cleared things up!
This is a TERRIBLE idea in my opinion. Apart from the blatant marketing LIES (this will NOT get you free money, you will lose money on the electricity, even the promotional material admits this in the fine print) this only claims to do things that EVERY OTHER computer already does.<p>You can already use APIs in half a dozen programming languages to do every one of the things they mention in this blog post, and you can do them for less than 5 cents per hour on EC2 (which is $400/year [compared to $400 upfront + electricity], but if you're running it for a year straight you can get it cheaper at places other than EC2).<p>If this didn't have the magic buzzword of "Bitcoin" in the name and a smorgasbord of people cross-promoting it for reasons I don't pretend to understand, everyone would see that it's just an overpriced, under-powered computer.
> <i>you can leave it plugged into the wall to provide a steady stream of Bitcoin</i><p>This seems dishonest. How much $USD worth of Bitcoin could you realistically produce in a day with a pocket-sized computer, net of the cost of electricity used to mine it?
Just like most developments in the bitcoin world, I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out what this thing actually does and why I want it. Isn't the whole major selling point of Bitcoin that it <i>isn't</i> physical and is instead totally digital? What does a "bitcoin command line" even mean?<p>"With this pocket-sized device, if you are an entrepreneur or developer, you can now instantly buy or sell digital goods and services at the command line using Bitcoin." Isn't that already all possible with just bitcoin itself? Why would I buy this thing?
1) Take more VC money than you actually need to build a product [0]<p>2) Spend 80-90% of that to buy Bitcoin<p>3) Do things to drive adoption and popularize Bitcoin<p>4) Profit!<p>0 - <a href="https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/21e6" rel="nofollow">https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/21e6</a>
You know how mobile networks made lots of money by letting third parties charge things to people's cell phone bills? I think 21 is trying to build carrier billing for everything. If everyone has a hundred dollars a month of mining power plugged in, 21 can issue those people a credit line secured by the ability to charge arbitrary, limited amounts to their electricity bills.
These two comments from the /r/Bitcoin thread [1] sum it up nicely:<p>"So it's an overpriced SHA256 ASIC attached to a Raspberry Pi? For $400?" [2]<p>"I'd rather just buy $399.99 worth of Bitcoin..." [3]<p>EDIT: Its first-listed "feature" on Amazon [4] seems disingenuous at best:<p><i>"Buy digital goods with the constant stream of bitcoin mined by a 21 Bitcoin Chip"</i><p>especially since the makers themselves refute this in their FAQ [5]:<p><i>"Yes, you can indeed make a profit with the 21 Bitcoin Computer. However, you would do so not by directly selling bitcoin, but by selling digital goods _for_ bitcoin. That is, you are not going to get rich by immediately selling the bitcoin mined by the device for offline currency, but you can potentially do very well by selling digital goods and services to others for their bitcoin."</i><p>In other words, there will hardly be a significant "constant stream of bitcoin mined" as the tech specs [6] make clear:<p><i>"the 21 Bitcoin Chip has an efficiency of approximately 0.16 Joules per Gigahash and can calculate 50-125 Gigahashes per second"</i><p>At the current difficulty, that would produce somewhere between 0.01289890 and 0.03224725 bitcoins per month [7]. Even if the difficulty remained constant, it would take many years to recoup the initial $400 investment.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3lucwl/21co_website_has_just_been_updated_introducing/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3lucwl/21co_websit...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3lucwl/21co_website_has_just_been_updated_introducing/cv9cuvx" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3lucwl/21co_websit...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3lucwl/21co_website_has_just_been_updated_introducing/cv9djoo" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3lucwl/21co_websit...</a><p>[4] <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014RD021C" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014RD021C</a><p>[5] <a href="https://21.co/faq/#making-a-profit" rel="nofollow">https://21.co/faq/#making-a-profit</a><p>[6] <a href="https://21.co/faq/#technical-specifications" rel="nofollow">https://21.co/faq/#technical-specifications</a><p>[7] <a href="https://alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator" rel="nofollow">https://alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator</a>
This is fascinating. It doesn't look like it's designed for bitcoin miners. It looks like it's the start of a future where computing power is traded for digital goods and services.
In case you haven't been following 21 Inc (formerly 21e6), this company has raised at least $121.1M: <a href="https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/21e6" rel="nofollow">https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/21e6</a>
> The 21 Bitcoin Chip means your 21 Bitcoin Computer has access to a constantly replenished source of bitcoin.<p>> This means you can now write programs that connect to the Bitcoin network just as easily as they connect to the Internet.<p>It sounds like the mining is intended to create a constant supply of bitcoins so you don't have to "top up" your wallet. Then the bitcoins are used to process things (putting information in the blockchain) and you're also selling access to run sandboxed code on your machine - presumably code which interacts with the blockchain.<p>They've phrased this terribly by saying you're selling "digital goods and services", overly broad and meaningless words.
Question for the bitcoin enthusiasts out there - if stolen computing time is a reasonable component of the current hash power, why would market rate for mined coins ever be above the cost of electricity?
The scrolljacking on <a href="https://www.21.co/" rel="nofollow">https://www.21.co/</a> is so bad. Just let me scroll through your nice looking site!
There is no chance in the world that you are even going to mine even a single block with this set up in a thousand years.<p>As a matter of fact even with a GPU rack it will take a hundred years or so given what you are up against by now.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXerV3f5jN8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXerV3f5jN8</a>
The whole rant around 21's "bitcoin computer", reminds me of this:
<a href="https://youtu.be/ojtMtIyD6dM?t=40" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/ojtMtIyD6dM?t=40</a>
- the product barely went on pre-sale and look how much buzz (albeit negative) it already generated.
Does anyone have an approximate btc/kwh (and thus $) this generates? Why don't I just convert money into btc much more efficiently and store it in my wallet?
The three most difficult questions with blockchain technology are "where is the blockchain data?", "where are the keys that represent my wallet?" and "how do I get my initial bitcoin?"<p>This product very succinctly answers both questions in a reliable way.<p>It looks like they've got some basic ability to write to the blockchain, and since this only costs a few thousand satoshis, the very small amounts of Bitcoin that this device mine will be useful.<p>It looks like they're hoping that further profits can be driven back to the address that wrote to the blockchain.<p>This is a really good idea but fully dependent on how hackable this is.<p>Like, do I get the full Bitcoin JSON-RPC interface?<p>This would let me use this device as a pretty reliable source of identification, using Bitcoin's public key infrastructure to sign and authenticate messages.<p>It would also let me write client software on behalf of the physical device that could read and write arbitrary messages to the Bitcoin blockchain, allowing for custom colored coins, but with keychain ownership contained only within the physical device, instead of on an external server or running on a laptop.<p>Do I have direct programmable access to the SHA-256 ASIC?<p>This would help with content-addressable distributions systems like IPFS.<p>It would be great if the device could expose an interface that was compatible with both Common Wallet and Common Blockchain.<p>Common Blockchain[1] is a protocol that aims to make an abstraction of queries against the blockchain, allowing devices like the 21 Bitcoin Computer, the Bitcoin Core software, and web services like Blockcypher to expose a single interface to client software and Blockchain meta-protocols like Open Assets, Blockcast [2] and Open Publish [3].<p>Likewise, Common Wallet is a protocol that aims to make an abstraction for wallets and key signing devices like the 21 Bitcoin Computer, Trezor, Mycellium, or Bitcoin Core, so all of these devices can sign custom transactions that were built by external libraries like Open Publish and to sign authentication messages for services like Bitstore [5].<p>There is a very big problem with interoperability between various Bitcoin wallets, protocols, and services, and there is really no reason for this to be the case if everyone were to expose the proper interfaces, which roughly model the Bitcoin JSON-RPC.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/blockai/abstract-common-blockchain" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/blockai/abstract-common-blockchain</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/blockai/blockcast" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/blockai/blockcast</a><p>[3] <a href="https://github.com/blockai/openpublish" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/blockai/openpublish</a><p>[4] <a href="https://github.com/blockai/abstract-common-wallet" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/blockai/abstract-common-wallet</a><p>[5] <a href="https://github.com/blockai/bitstore-client" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/blockai/bitstore-client</a>