13 ms·

The 21 Bitcoin Computer

129 points by paulbaumgart 11y ago

minimaxir 11y ago
> you can leave it plugged into the wall to provide a steady stream of Bitcoin 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?
- saiko-chriskun 11y ago
  Mining bitcoin for fiat is not its purpose.
  - minimaxir 11y ago
    The alternative is to just buy Bitcoin with fiat instead of running random hardware from a startup for days to get any meaningful value.
  - seiji 11y ago
    I believe it's called "money." As in, "I wish to exchange my fantasy internet points for money."
    - VMG 11y ago
      > I believe That's why it is called "fiat"
      - teraflop 11y ago
        That's a snappy one-liner, but "a currency which has value because people believe in it" applies just as well to Bitcoin as it does to the US dollar.
        jfb 11y ago
        It also doesn't make any damn sense, given that "fiat" is Latin for "let it be done", not "I believe".
  - detaro 11y ago
    Why is "USD worth of Bitcoin" not a reasonable approximation for the value you get from the bitcoins it generates?
- Sambdala 11y ago
  Saw a calculation that estimated it at $0.25 / day at current hashrates.
  - Phlarp 11y ago
    It'll be even lower by the Nov. 16th release date, if they manage to ship on time. If the past is any guide, that quarter a day will rapidly decay towards 0 as the global hashrate continues to grow.
    - dest 11y ago
      > "that quarter a day will rapidly decay towards 0 as the global hashrate continues to grow" The hashrate increase has been quite slow during the last months [1]. We are far from the exponential-like increases during the bubbles. [1] https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty
      - logicallee 11y ago
        is this because some people (companies) are just not bothering to plug their rigs in? (i.e. some hash power is just leaving the network despite existing as dedicated hardware good for nothing else.)
        Phlarp 11y ago
        To some extent it's fallen off because we've reached (somewhat) of a plateau. Originally all mining was done using CPU resources, but the first big jump up in hashrate came as folks started to figure out GPU mining. As GPU mining grew more popular, the hard core geeks started looking at FPGAs and eventually we made it to full blown ASIC miners. The last big explosion of hashrate was driven by the bulk of miners adopting ASIC hardware of one flavor or another. Now that the majority of miners are on SHA256 ASICs the only gains to be made are by shrinking the die and increasing the transistor count but even those hard earned gains are going to be quickly diminished as ASIC hardware "catches up" to Moore's law. As for hash power leaving the network, if you are mining as a business then you are 100% at the mercy of 1) how much you pay for electricity and 2) market price for coins. Given how many schemes exist for stealing either computing power or electricity I imagine the margins will converge on a negative number at a large enough scale.
- nerevarthelame 11y ago
  Even their official FAQ states that you won't be able to mine at a profit with their product: "Can you make a profit with the 21 Bitcoin Computer after accounting for energy costs? 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." [https://www.21.co/faq/ https://www.21.co/faq/]
  - zyxley 11y ago
    So, "yes, you can make a profit, but only if it has nothing to do with the 21 Bitcoin Computer".
    - VikingCoder 11y ago
      Yes, you can make a profit - if you agree to kill someone with the 21 Bitcoin Computer as the murder weapon.
      - zyxley 11y ago
        This sounds like an opening for some sort of noir-absurdist series with some of the flavor of 100 Bullets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Bullets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Bullets
  - Loughla 11y ago
    God, how is that marketing? Honestly, how is that just seen as 'marketing'? How did they justify even writing that sentence with a clear conscience? This is just infuriating. This is just taking advantage of stupid/impatient people who will order to get rich quick, and not read anything about what they're doing. It's taking advantage of people, knowing full well they don't understand what you're marketing to them. Seriously, think about the uproar if this were medicine; buy this pill to cure your cancer.* *Pill doesn't actually cure cancer, but somewhere a doctor is able to help you with that.
comrh 11y ago
Is that big thing on a top a heatsink?
- Sanddancer 11y ago
  Yes.
- TimWolla 11y ago
  According to the photos on Amazon it's a case. But there is a heatsink and a fan underneath: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/91aUgUqFTIL._SL1500_.jpg http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/91aUgUqFTIL._SL1500_.j...
miles 11y ago
These two comments from the /r/Bitcoin thread [1] sum it up nicely: "So it's an overpriced SHA256 ASIC attached to a Raspberry Pi? For $400?" [2] "I'd rather just buy $399.99 worth of Bitcoin..." [3] EDIT: Its first-listed "feature" on Amazon [4] seems disingenuous at best: "Buy digital goods with the constant stream of bitcoin mined by a 21 Bitcoin Chip" especially since the makers themselves refute this in their FAQ [5]: "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." In other words, there will hardly be a significant "constant stream of bitcoin mined" as the tech specs [6] make clear: "the 21 Bitcoin Chip has an efficiency of approximately 0.16 Joules per Gigahash and can calculate 50-125 Gigahashes per second" 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. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3lucwl/21co_website_has_just_been_updated_introducing/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3lucwl/21co_websit... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3lucwl/21co_website_has_just_been_updated_introducing/cv9cuvx https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3lucwl/21co_websit... [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3lucwl/21co_website_has_just_been_updated_introducing/cv9djoo https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3lucwl/21co_websit... [4] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014RD021C http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014RD021C [5] https://21.co/faq/#making-a-profit https://21.co/faq/#making-a-profit [6] https://21.co/faq/#technical-specifications https://21.co/faq/#technical-specifications [7] https://alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator https://alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator
- Phlarp 11y ago
  "Can you make a profit with the 21 Bitcoin Computer after accounting for energy costs? 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." These guys deserve an award for sleaziest PR spin.
  - 11y ago
natrius 11y ago
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.
- minimaxir 11y ago
  Carrier billing worked because there were zero alternatives back in the day and they could charge whatever they wanted. When App Stores became popular with free/low-cost apps, carrier billing died out. In this case, there is an alternative to the 21 computer known as money.
  - natrius 11y ago
    Unless you're paying with bitcoins, you can't just teleport money. You need to transfer it via third parties. Credit cards do this and take a ~3% cut. If 21 can get its chips into every household, they can take a much smaller cut, especially since the chance that a customer won't pay their bill is lower. You'd have to unplug your mining chips to avoid a bill, which would instantly notify 21. They can charge money to people's electricity bills and pay no fee. That is a competitive position.
    - Sanddancer 11y ago
      I can send money via various electronic fund transfer systems that do exist, not just through credit cards. There even exist standards, like SWIFT, to do this internationally. So yes, banks can transfer in a very similar way as bitcoin.
- akhilcacharya 11y ago
  That's the only interesting application of their low-power mining tech so far in my opinion - having the ability to offer innovative pricing schemes or heavily subsidize nearly any electronic good.
airza 11y ago
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?
- natrius 11y ago
  Because the cost of electricity required to mine competitively is variable. When the price of bitcoins goes up, mining becomes more profitable. More hashpower is added by new and existing miners until it no longer makes financial sense to do so. The value of a bitcoin is almost always near the cost of mining one, but it's the value that determines how much mining there is.
- placeybordeaux 11y ago
  These days the extreme majority of hashing power comes from ASICs not from botnets.
  - Phlarp 11y ago
    A few edge cases to consider here: 1) ASIC hardware running on free, stolen or "creatively accounted" electricity. Maybe it's as mundane as a janitor with a bunch of hardware stashed in a closet, or an office complex that charges a flat rate for utilities. Maybe it's as exotic as a mining farm getting a cut rate on nearby power generation in a cold climate. 1) ASIC hardware, by it's very nature, requires some type of network connectivity-- either with other miners, a special dispatching machine or directly to the bitcoin network over TCP, one way or another it needs to know what the blockchain looks like at any given point in time. This means attack surface area. All it takes is one widely deployed bug and those machines you run are mining into someone else's account. Both of these scenarios, along with countless others, make mining in any capacity a negative sum game.
    - brighton36 11y ago
      It's clearly not a negative sum game as evidenced by the 6 years that miners have been mining. It's typically a very low-profit, high-stress business - but you can't argue with the numbers.
zettahash 11y ago
It sounds like a marketer got a little too excited and decided to name their developer kit The 21 Bitcoin Computer, not realizing the confusion they were about to create. 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. 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.
- tvladeck 11y ago
  I actually don't think a marketer touched this project at all. If one did, they didn't do a great job defining the purpose of this device. They didn't talk - or if they did, they didn't listen - to potential customers about what pain point this could solve. They didn't define a positioning for this product. Etc. Sell goods for BTC? What about Stripe / Braintree? Buy goods w/ BTC? What about buying BTC on Coinbase? Mine BTC? There are more economical ways.
  - akhilcacharya 11y ago
    The only real value of 21's product is power efficient mining. I'm bewildered as to why they would focus on the buying or selling aspect.
    - fit2rule 11y ago
      Because this thing contains everything you need to operate in the Bitcoin economy at all levels - mining, purchasing, selling BtC - in a smart little easy to install package. So I'm a small business owner in .. lets say, Morocco, or .. Laos, or Sao Paolo, and I want to stop using US$ to purchase stuff from China. This makes it very, very easy to do that.
pkinsky 11y ago
Not sure I like the name, I came into this thread expecting to read about a computer built using 21 BTC worth of components.
- logicallee 11y ago
  It's a particular problem in titles that use title case.[1] What I mean is that in any such title, 21 Bitcoin Computer will read like 21 bitcoin computer. I would argue that due to the extremely unusual name (Edit: see replies to this comment) our title should read "21 introduces 21 Bitcoin Computer" or "21 Bitcoin Computer from 21" or something. [1] Though editors in all media are slowly moving away from title case, especially in newspapers (I mean as opposed to films and books) - the NYT and WSJ are both still on title case, but not the USA Today, Boston Globe, SF Chronicle, or, for that matter, FT. HN is mixed: for example, out of the 30 articles currently on the front page, 22 are in title case, but 8 aren't. (There are no ambiguous ones currently, such as a single word or a single word and then only numbers or prepositions.) Reddit has completely moved to sentence case. EDIT: I missed one, "Netflix Lemur" is ambiguous. Here's my sample/dataset: http://pastie.org/10436384* http://pastie.org/10436384*
  - pkinsky 11y ago
    The Bitcoin computer by 21, maybe. I hate to come into a thread about something cool that someone built just to complain about the name, but it just doesn't scan.
    - logicallee 11y ago
      can you name any other companies (or projects) that literally match [0-9]+? No Googling :) It would be as if "37 signals" had been called just "37". Oh, wait, they have no reason to be confusing :) By the way I wasn't among the people complaining - I just think a title with some lowercase in it may be clearer. Maybe not though. I was still wrong after reading the whole article and the whole article it links. The name of the company is 21 (supposedly) and the name of this computer is the Bitcoin Computer or maybe 21 Bitcoin Computer.
deleted 11y ago
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cschep 11y ago
The scrolljacking on https://www.21.co/ https://www.21.co/ is so bad. Just let me scroll through your nice looking site!
powera 11y ago
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. 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). 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.
- STRML 11y ago
  Perhaps the real value will be in the software. But I would expect that software to be open anyway. There's nothing I see that can be done by this "Bitcoin Computer" that couldn't be done by a raspi + a few hundred thousand satoshis bought from an exchange for a dollar or two. But this solution has more buzzwords. Is this the result of "Valley Economics" optimizing for investment, not revenue?
  - fit2rule 11y ago
    Its plug and play. So that is something that is very badly needed for a majority of people who might want to use BtC.
- dang 11y ago
  "Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - powera 11y ago
    Huh. Never realized that was an official rule for comments as well as headlines.
idiotclock 11y ago
Is the 'native' cli free?
- idiotclock 11y ago
  Well it's 400 dollars,* I figure "the suite of pre-configured Bitcoin-dependent software" is what hikes up the price. 1 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014RD021C?camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B014RD021C&linkCode=as2&linkId=K36ZRXOEXVD5LYXL&redirect=true&ref_=as_li_tl&tag=21inccorsit-20 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014RD021C?camp=1789&creati...
  - mwilcox 11y ago
    The low expected production run for a custom handware development kit would be what drives the price up.
dchuk 11y ago
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 isn't physical and is instead totally digital? What does a "bitcoin command line" even mean? "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?
spullara 11y ago
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?
undefined0 11y ago
> The 21 Bitcoin Chip means your 21 Bitcoin Computer has access to a constantly replenished source of bitcoin. > This means you can now write programs that connect to the Bitcoin network just as easily as they connect to the Internet. 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. They've phrased this terribly by saying you're selling "digital goods and services", overly broad and meaningless words.
undefined0 11y ago
> The 21 Bitcoin Chip means your 21 Bitcoin Computer has access to a constantly replenished source of bitcoin. > This means you can now write programs that connect to the Bitcoin network just as easily as they connect to the Internet. 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. They've phrased this terribly by saying you're selling "digital goods and services", overly broad and meaningless words.
williamcotton 11y ago
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?" This product very succinctly answers both questions in a reliable way. 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. It looks like they're hoping that further profits can be driven back to the address that wrote to the blockchain. This is a really good idea but fully dependent on how hackable this is. Like, do I get the full Bitcoin JSON-RPC interface? 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. 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. Do I have direct programmable access to the SHA-256 ASIC? This would help with content-addressable distributions systems like IPFS. It would be great if the device could expose an interface that was compatible with both Common Wallet and Common Blockchain. 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]. 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]. 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. [1] https://github.com/blockai/abstract-common-blockchain https://github.com/blockai/abstract-common-blockchain [2] https://github.com/blockai/blockcast https://github.com/blockai/blockcast [3] https://github.com/blockai/openpublish https://github.com/blockai/openpublish [4] https://github.com/blockai/abstract-common-wallet https://github.com/blockai/abstract-common-wallet [5] https://github.com/blockai/bitstore-client https://github.com/blockai/bitstore-client
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jboggan 11y ago
1) Take more VC money than you actually need to build a product [0] 2) Spend 80-90% of that to buy Bitcoin 3) Do things to drive adoption and popularize Bitcoin 4) Profit! 0 - https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/21e6 https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/21e6
- wmf 11y ago
  Wrapping your software in a $400 dongle seems like a really roundabout way of driving Bitcoin adoption, but I suppose it will ensure that all the customers are true believers.
Mahn 11y ago
What a strange product. For the life of me I can't figure out who is this for.
tlrobinson 11y ago
In case you haven't been following 21 Inc (formerly 21e6), this company has raised at least $121.1M: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/21e6 https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/21e6
vajrapani666 11y ago
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. 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. It started to get funny, the CEO would only interview a candidate at 10pm on a Thursday. "pretty busy during the daytime" they said. 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. I feel like I got off the call pretty bewildered. Glad this cleared things up!
vajrapani666 11y ago
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. 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. It started to get funny, the CEO would only interview a candidate at 10pm on a Thursday. "pretty busy during the daytime" they said. 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. I feel like I got off the call pretty bewildered. Glad this cleared things up!
trg2 11y ago
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.
a-dub 11y ago
I suspect that this company will probably go down in history, but probably not for the reasons they think...
sigma2015 11y ago
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. 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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXerV3f5jN8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXerV3f5jN8
minerb50 11y ago
The whole rant around 21's "bitcoin computer", reminds me of this: https://youtu.be/ojtMtIyD6dM?t=40 https://youtu.be/ojtMtIyD6dM?t=40 - the product barely went on pre-sale and look how much buzz (albeit negative) it already generated.

129 points by paulbaumgart 11y ago

> you can leave it plugged into the wall to provide a steady stream of Bitcoin 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?

saiko-chriskun 11y ago
Mining bitcoin for fiat is not its purpose.
- minimaxir 11y ago
  The alternative is to just buy Bitcoin with fiat instead of running random hardware from a startup for days to get any meaningful value.
- seiji 11y ago
  I believe it's called "money." As in, "I wish to exchange my fantasy internet points for money."
  - VMG 11y ago
    > I believe That's why it is called "fiat"
    - teraflop 11y ago
      That's a snappy one-liner, but "a currency which has value because people believe in it" applies just as well to Bitcoin as it does to the US dollar.
      - jfb 11y ago
        It also doesn't make any damn sense, given that "fiat" is Latin for "let it be done", not "I believe".
- detaro 11y ago
  Why is "USD worth of Bitcoin" not a reasonable approximation for the value you get from the bitcoins it generates?
Sambdala 11y ago
Saw a calculation that estimated it at $0.25 / day at current hashrates.
- Phlarp 11y ago
  It'll be even lower by the Nov. 16th release date, if they manage to ship on time. If the past is any guide, that quarter a day will rapidly decay towards 0 as the global hashrate continues to grow.
  - dest 11y ago
    > "that quarter a day will rapidly decay towards 0 as the global hashrate continues to grow" The hashrate increase has been quite slow during the last months [1]. We are far from the exponential-like increases during the bubbles. [1] https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty
    - logicallee 11y ago
      is this because some people (companies) are just not bothering to plug their rigs in? (i.e. some hash power is just leaving the network despite existing as dedicated hardware good for nothing else.)
      - Phlarp 11y ago
        To some extent it's fallen off because we've reached (somewhat) of a plateau. Originally all mining was done using CPU resources, but the first big jump up in hashrate came as folks started to figure out GPU mining. As GPU mining grew more popular, the hard core geeks started looking at FPGAs and eventually we made it to full blown ASIC miners. The last big explosion of hashrate was driven by the bulk of miners adopting ASIC hardware of one flavor or another. Now that the majority of miners are on SHA256 ASICs the only gains to be made are by shrinking the die and increasing the transistor count but even those hard earned gains are going to be quickly diminished as ASIC hardware "catches up" to Moore's law. As for hash power leaving the network, if you are mining as a business then you are 100% at the mercy of 1) how much you pay for electricity and 2) market price for coins. Given how many schemes exist for stealing either computing power or electricity I imagine the margins will converge on a negative number at a large enough scale.
nerevarthelame 11y ago
Even their official FAQ states that you won't be able to mine at a profit with their product: "Can you make a profit with the 21 Bitcoin Computer after accounting for energy costs? 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." [https://www.21.co/faq/ https://www.21.co/faq/]
- zyxley 11y ago
  So, "yes, you can make a profit, but only if it has nothing to do with the 21 Bitcoin Computer".
  - VikingCoder 11y ago
    Yes, you can make a profit - if you agree to kill someone with the 21 Bitcoin Computer as the murder weapon.
    - zyxley 11y ago
      This sounds like an opening for some sort of noir-absurdist series with some of the flavor of 100 Bullets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Bullets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Bullets
- Loughla 11y ago
  God, how is that marketing? Honestly, how is that just seen as 'marketing'? How did they justify even writing that sentence with a clear conscience? This is just infuriating. This is just taking advantage of stupid/impatient people who will order to get rich quick, and not read anything about what they're doing. It's taking advantage of people, knowing full well they don't understand what you're marketing to them. Seriously, think about the uproar if this were medicine; buy this pill to cure your cancer.* *Pill doesn't actually cure cancer, but somewhere a doctor is able to help you with that.

comrh 11y ago

Is that big thing on a top a heatsink?

Sanddancer 11y ago
Yes.
TimWolla 11y ago
According to the photos on Amazon it's a case. But there is a heatsink and a fan underneath: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/91aUgUqFTIL._SL1500_.jpg http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/91aUgUqFTIL._SL1500_.j...

miles 11y ago

These two comments from the /r/Bitcoin thread [1] sum it up nicely: "So it's an overpriced SHA256 ASIC attached to a Raspberry Pi? For $400?" [2] "I'd rather just buy $399.99 worth of Bitcoin..." [3] EDIT: Its first-listed "feature" on Amazon [4] seems disingenuous at best: "Buy digital goods with the constant stream of bitcoin mined by a 21 Bitcoin Chip" especially since the makers themselves refute this in their FAQ [5]: "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." In other words, there will hardly be a significant "constant stream of bitcoin mined" as the tech specs [6] make clear: "the 21 Bitcoin Chip has an efficiency of approximately 0.16 Joules per Gigahash and can calculate 50-125 Gigahashes per second" 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. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3lucwl/21co_website_has_just_been_updated_introducing/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3lucwl/21co_websit... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3lucwl/21co_website_has_just_been_updated_introducing/cv9cuvx https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3lucwl/21co_websit... [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3lucwl/21co_website_has_just_been_updated_introducing/cv9djoo https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3lucwl/21co_websit... [4] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014RD021C http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014RD021C [5] https://21.co/faq/#making-a-profit https://21.co/faq/#making-a-profit [6] https://21.co/faq/#technical-specifications https://21.co/faq/#technical-specifications [7] https://alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator https://alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator

Phlarp 11y ago
"Can you make a profit with the 21 Bitcoin Computer after accounting for energy costs? 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." These guys deserve an award for sleaziest PR spin.
- 11y ago

natrius 11y ago

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.

minimaxir 11y ago
Carrier billing worked because there were zero alternatives back in the day and they could charge whatever they wanted. When App Stores became popular with free/low-cost apps, carrier billing died out. In this case, there is an alternative to the 21 computer known as money.
- natrius 11y ago
  Unless you're paying with bitcoins, you can't just teleport money. You need to transfer it via third parties. Credit cards do this and take a ~3% cut. If 21 can get its chips into every household, they can take a much smaller cut, especially since the chance that a customer won't pay their bill is lower. You'd have to unplug your mining chips to avoid a bill, which would instantly notify 21. They can charge money to people's electricity bills and pay no fee. That is a competitive position.
  - Sanddancer 11y ago
    I can send money via various electronic fund transfer systems that do exist, not just through credit cards. There even exist standards, like SWIFT, to do this internationally. So yes, banks can transfer in a very similar way as bitcoin.
akhilcacharya 11y ago
That's the only interesting application of their low-power mining tech so far in my opinion - having the ability to offer innovative pricing schemes or heavily subsidize nearly any electronic good.

airza 11y ago

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?

natrius 11y ago
Because the cost of electricity required to mine competitively is variable. When the price of bitcoins goes up, mining becomes more profitable. More hashpower is added by new and existing miners until it no longer makes financial sense to do so. The value of a bitcoin is almost always near the cost of mining one, but it's the value that determines how much mining there is.
placeybordeaux 11y ago
These days the extreme majority of hashing power comes from ASICs not from botnets.
- Phlarp 11y ago
  A few edge cases to consider here: 1) ASIC hardware running on free, stolen or "creatively accounted" electricity. Maybe it's as mundane as a janitor with a bunch of hardware stashed in a closet, or an office complex that charges a flat rate for utilities. Maybe it's as exotic as a mining farm getting a cut rate on nearby power generation in a cold climate. 1) ASIC hardware, by it's very nature, requires some type of network connectivity-- either with other miners, a special dispatching machine or directly to the bitcoin network over TCP, one way or another it needs to know what the blockchain looks like at any given point in time. This means attack surface area. All it takes is one widely deployed bug and those machines you run are mining into someone else's account. Both of these scenarios, along with countless others, make mining in any capacity a negative sum game.
  - brighton36 11y ago
    It's clearly not a negative sum game as evidenced by the 6 years that miners have been mining. It's typically a very low-profit, high-stress business - but you can't argue with the numbers.

zettahash 11y ago

It sounds like a marketer got a little too excited and decided to name their developer kit The 21 Bitcoin Computer, not realizing the confusion they were about to create. 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. 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.

tvladeck 11y ago
I actually don't think a marketer touched this project at all. If one did, they didn't do a great job defining the purpose of this device. They didn't talk - or if they did, they didn't listen - to potential customers about what pain point this could solve. They didn't define a positioning for this product. Etc. Sell goods for BTC? What about Stripe / Braintree? Buy goods w/ BTC? What about buying BTC on Coinbase? Mine BTC? There are more economical ways.
- akhilcacharya 11y ago
  The only real value of 21's product is power efficient mining. I'm bewildered as to why they would focus on the buying or selling aspect.
  - fit2rule 11y ago
    Because this thing contains everything you need to operate in the Bitcoin economy at all levels - mining, purchasing, selling BtC - in a smart little easy to install package. So I'm a small business owner in .. lets say, Morocco, or .. Laos, or Sao Paolo, and I want to stop using US$ to purchase stuff from China. This makes it very, very easy to do that.

pkinsky 11y ago

Not sure I like the name, I came into this thread expecting to read about a computer built using 21 BTC worth of components.

logicallee 11y ago
It's a particular problem in titles that use title case.[1] What I mean is that in any such title, 21 Bitcoin Computer will read like 21 bitcoin computer. I would argue that due to the extremely unusual name (Edit: see replies to this comment) our title should read "21 introduces 21 Bitcoin Computer" or "21 Bitcoin Computer from 21" or something. [1] Though editors in all media are slowly moving away from title case, especially in newspapers (I mean as opposed to films and books) - the NYT and WSJ are both still on title case, but not the USA Today, Boston Globe, SF Chronicle, or, for that matter, FT. HN is mixed: for example, out of the 30 articles currently on the front page, 22 are in title case, but 8 aren't. (There are no ambiguous ones currently, such as a single word or a single word and then only numbers or prepositions.) Reddit has completely moved to sentence case. EDIT: I missed one, "Netflix Lemur" is ambiguous. Here's my sample/dataset: http://pastie.org/10436384* http://pastie.org/10436384*
- pkinsky 11y ago
  The Bitcoin computer by 21, maybe. I hate to come into a thread about something cool that someone built just to complain about the name, but it just doesn't scan.
  - logicallee 11y ago
    can you name any other companies (or projects) that literally match [0-9]+? No Googling :) It would be as if "37 signals" had been called just "37". Oh, wait, they have no reason to be confusing :) By the way I wasn't among the people complaining - I just think a title with some lowercase in it may be clearer. Maybe not though. I was still wrong after reading the whole article and the whole article it links. The name of the company is 21 (supposedly) and the name of this computer is the Bitcoin Computer or maybe 21 Bitcoin Computer.

deleted 11y ago

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cschep 11y ago

The scrolljacking on https://www.21.co/ https://www.21.co/ is so bad. Just let me scroll through your nice looking site!

powera 11y ago

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. 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). 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.

STRML 11y ago
Perhaps the real value will be in the software. But I would expect that software to be open anyway. There's nothing I see that can be done by this "Bitcoin Computer" that couldn't be done by a raspi + a few hundred thousand satoshis bought from an exchange for a dollar or two. But this solution has more buzzwords. Is this the result of "Valley Economics" optimizing for investment, not revenue?
- fit2rule 11y ago
  Its plug and play. So that is something that is very badly needed for a majority of people who might want to use BtC.
dang 11y ago
"Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- powera 11y ago
  Huh. Never realized that was an official rule for comments as well as headlines.

idiotclock 11y ago

Is the 'native' cli free?

idiotclock 11y ago
Well it's 400 dollars,* I figure "the suite of pre-configured Bitcoin-dependent software" is what hikes up the price. 1 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014RD021C?camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B014RD021C&linkCode=as2&linkId=K36ZRXOEXVD5LYXL&redirect=true&ref_=as_li_tl&tag=21inccorsit-20 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014RD021C?camp=1789&creati...
- mwilcox 11y ago
  The low expected production run for a custom handware development kit would be what drives the price up.

dchuk 11y ago

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 isn't physical and is instead totally digital? What does a "bitcoin command line" even mean? "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?

spullara 11y ago

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?

undefined0 11y ago

> The 21 Bitcoin Chip means your 21 Bitcoin Computer has access to a constantly replenished source of bitcoin. > This means you can now write programs that connect to the Bitcoin network just as easily as they connect to the Internet. 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. They've phrased this terribly by saying you're selling "digital goods and services", overly broad and meaningless words.

undefined0 11y ago

williamcotton 11y ago

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?" This product very succinctly answers both questions in a reliable way. 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. It looks like they're hoping that further profits can be driven back to the address that wrote to the blockchain. This is a really good idea but fully dependent on how hackable this is. Like, do I get the full Bitcoin JSON-RPC interface? 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. 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. Do I have direct programmable access to the SHA-256 ASIC? This would help with content-addressable distributions systems like IPFS. It would be great if the device could expose an interface that was compatible with both Common Wallet and Common Blockchain. 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]. 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]. 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. [1] https://github.com/blockai/abstract-common-blockchain https://github.com/blockai/abstract-common-blockchain [2] https://github.com/blockai/blockcast https://github.com/blockai/blockcast [3] https://github.com/blockai/openpublish https://github.com/blockai/openpublish [4] https://github.com/blockai/abstract-common-wallet https://github.com/blockai/abstract-common-wallet [5] https://github.com/blockai/bitstore-client https://github.com/blockai/bitstore-client

deleted 11y ago

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jboggan 11y ago

1) Take more VC money than you actually need to build a product [0] 2) Spend 80-90% of that to buy Bitcoin 3) Do things to drive adoption and popularize Bitcoin 4) Profit! 0 - https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/21e6 https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/21e6

wmf 11y ago
Wrapping your software in a $400 dongle seems like a really roundabout way of driving Bitcoin adoption, but I suppose it will ensure that all the customers are true believers.

Mahn 11y ago

What a strange product. For the life of me I can't figure out who is this for.

tlrobinson 11y ago

In case you haven't been following 21 Inc (formerly 21e6), this company has raised at least $121.1M: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/21e6 https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/21e6

vajrapani666 11y ago

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. 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. It started to get funny, the CEO would only interview a candidate at 10pm on a Thursday. "pretty busy during the daytime" they said. 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. I feel like I got off the call pretty bewildered. Glad this cleared things up!

vajrapani666 11y ago

trg2 11y ago

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.

a-dub 11y ago

I suspect that this company will probably go down in history, but probably not for the reasons they think...

sigma2015 11y ago

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. 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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXerV3f5jN8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXerV3f5jN8

minerb50 11y ago

The whole rant around 21's "bitcoin computer", reminds me of this: https://youtu.be/ojtMtIyD6dM?t=40 https://youtu.be/ojtMtIyD6dM?t=40 - the product barely went on pre-sale and look how much buzz (albeit negative) it already generated.