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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 th

by 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.
  - dang 11y ago
    pg hates all caps. (Edit: that might have been too laconic, but I thought it would be amusing to make a comment with no capital letter. What I mean is that that's how the policy originated.)
markkat 11y ago
I believe they are using their mining power, plus what is added from this pool of devices to include the fee-less microtransactions created from these devices in their blocks. In other words, this is intended to be a solution to the microtransaction problem.

by powera 11y ago

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.
- dang 11y ago
  pg hates all caps. (Edit: that might have been too laconic, but I thought it would be amusing to make a comment with no capital letter. What I mean is that that's how the policy originated.)

markkat 11y ago

I believe they are using their mining power, plus what is added from this pool of devices to include the fee-less microtransactions created from these devices in their blocks. In other words, this is intended to be a solution to the microtransaction problem.