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21 Makes Bitcoin Useful to Developers
- LandoCalrissian 10y agoHow, seriously?
- fiatjaf 10y agoHow do I get the Bitcoin?
- corv 10y agoEither you own 21's embedded Bitcoin device which can mine Bitcoins itself or you buy them from one of the myriad of exchanges. http://circle.com http://circle.com or http://coinbase.com http://coinbase.com for instance. Also, "The easiest but most limited way to get some bitcoin with 21 is to run 21 faucet, which gives you a small amount of bitcoin to play with."
- kooshball 10y agoThis service actually comes with a way to get bitcoins for "free" or mine with their hardware. "The easiest but most limited way to get some bitcoin with 21 is to run 21 faucet, which gives you a small amount of bitcoin to play with." https://21.co/learn/intro-to-21/#21-faucet-get-bitcoin-from-faucet-or-microtasks https://21.co/learn/intro-to-21/#21-faucet-get-bitcoin-from-...
- kolinko 10y agoCoinbase.com, Bitmarket.net, Kraken.com to name a few exchanges. Also, http://www.reddit.com/r/btc http://www.reddit.com/r/btc is a nice bitcoin community.
- oska 10y agoAlternative opinion: /r/btc is full of cranks and conspiracy-theory credulists.
- kordless 10y agoI've been talking about hooking cryptocurrencies up to APIs for a few years now. Today's startup business models are coarse to the point of being stupid. Worse, mistakes in the model cause user suffering later when pricing has to be implemented to take the company profitable. Pay attention to these types of offerings that hook revenue up directly to code. They are the future of software development and "self hosting" of applications. I also think they will have far reaching implications on the more traditional VC startup models.
- doctorcroc 10y agoDo you think this business model has to necessarily use bitcoin as the vehicle?
- paavokoya 10y agoWhat else would it use? USD doesn't have it's own online transaction rails. You need a 3rd party to do that. Which requires a boatload of arbitrary fees.
- doctorcroc 10y agoNot sure -- I was asking in earnest (although competing cc's like ethereum come to mind). Just wondering if there is not a way to hook up payments to APIs using existing infrastructure and currencies.
- domsch 10y agoThe short answer is: No. I don't see how Bitcoin fits into IoT. We are working on the exact same usecase at IOTA (http://iotatoken.com http://iotatoken.com), only our solution is scalable, lightweight and most importantly: there are no transaction fees.
- kordless 10y agoIf you have some reference code for IOTA, I'd like to see it. I'm firmly against any type of closed source Infrastructure code, so I'm hoping that's the plan here. I would also mention that we're not QUITE there yet with this stuff, so over engineering solutions to be scalable to trillions of devices is probably overkill. Giving a simple IOT device a small wallet to pay for its infrequent API calls is probably doable with Bitcoin, even with transaction costs. For other use cases, I can envision proxy devices with keys that represent the smaller, low power, frequent transmissions.
- corv 10y ago"21 is free software that implements the Payment Required HTTP status code and much more besides. It makes it easy to (a) send and receive micropayments over HTTP and to (b) write new kinds of programs that use this basic technology as an intrinsic primitive, like machine-payable APIs and intelligent agents."
- cyphar 10y ago"Free software": I don't see a GitHub repo. And they have non-free terms of use. The admin should use a better word, like gratis, to describe a proprietary service.
- TylerE 10y agoThey're only required to deliver source to anyone they give a binary to. Having a "github repo" isn't any part of the open source/free software definition.
- minimaxir 10y ago21 may make Bitcoin useful to developers, but it will never be useful to anyone in charge of the development budget at atleast $0.01/query for trivial queries: https://21.co/mkt/ https://21.co/mkt/ Any business which intends to last longer than a hackathon would get a greater long-term advantage by developing such queries in-house. And most of those example APIs are available for free from IBM Watson/AlchemyAPI/Open Source anyways.
- bduerst 10y agoI don't get it - are these just API wrappers with (more expensive) bitcoin pricing?
- minimaxir 10y agoCorrect. And it is tauted as a feature since you don't need "credit card, signup, or API key." https://medium.com/@21/buy-50-apis-with-bitcoin-in-the-21-marketplace-1fbf5208e397 https://medium.com/@21/buy-50-apis-with-bitcoin-in-the-21-ma...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- bduerst 10y agoRight, but isn't it replacing that functionality with the additional need of an embedded bitcoin wallet? The command line example in that article requires a $400 bitcoin device.
- j2kun 10y agoI think you missed the one-line terminal command that installs on any linux-based device. You can get the tools set up in just a few minutes, and for free, actually.
- kolinko 10y agoFor now, they just launched.
- TylerE 10y agoNever has a VC been given so much and had so little to show for it.
- marodox 10y ago$121 million lol
- aurelius12 10y agoThese guys are clearly flailing at this point.
- ianpurton 10y agoThere's some interesting APIs in the market like a Captcha solver for example. I could see that getting used. So I guess the blackhat market will get covered pretty quickly.
- isuckatcoding 10y agoUnless I am misunderstanding how Bitcoin works, doesn't this make the whole Bitcoin mechanism a bit centralized since every transaction would have to go through the 21.co servers?
- paavokoya 10y agoSimilar to the internet and AOL in the late 90's..
- aminok 10y agoYes (though unlike traditional third party intermediaries, there is no third party custodian for money you receive, meaning you don't have to trust 21 to not steal/freeze funds you've received). The innovative component of this that Bitcoin brings to the table is that the payment system linking the users to the developers is open/non-proprietary, with no registration walls encumbering usage.
- lgas 10y agoI don't know how 21 actually works but it could be built in a way that the example code on their home page works without ever talking to their servers. That could code manage the transaction directly with the block chain.
- bobwaycott 10y agoLet me see if I have this right, using an example we all know: 1. Build Twitter 2. Gain critical mass[1] 3. Place APIs behind Bitcoin transaction[2] 4. Actually have a revenue model and be (maybe one day) profitable, without ever having to sell your users to advertisers? 5. Let others build whatever they like atop your platform without ever being bothered about it threatening your core business? What have I missed? Edit: formatting & footnotes --- [1]: or don't wait, and start that way so it's not a surprise to people later [2]: perhaps swap(2,3)
- hueving 10y agoCharging for API usage isn't as profitable as selling your users to advertisers. Otherwise twitter would already be living just off of selling the firehose.
- deftnerd 10y agoProblem is that when you sell your users to advertisers, it's reducing the value of your service in the users mind. I value websites with heavy advertising to be less attractive to me and less valuable. As more users get turned off, the websites will be able to get less money from advertisers. It can become a snowball effect that kills a service.
- bduerst 10y agoMost engineers and software developers don't click on ads or use advertising mediums [1]. Other user segments are less bothered by them. https://medium.com/@robleathern/people-in-silicon-valley-don-t-click-on-ads-9d2eed1c74af#.ioqcv0e60 https://medium.com/@robleathern/people-in-silicon-valley-don...
- bobwaycott 10y agoMaybe not as profitable, but that seems to be a tangential issue. Just trying to understand what's being proposed here.
- aavotins 10y ago
- bobwaycott 10y agoSemi-related question: What makes this more attractive, friendlier, and/or plausible than building a service whereby your users—that is, developers—place a CC on file (via Stripe or whatever), and then just charge them by total monthly API requests in one bill?
- deftnerd 10y agoOne benefit of 21's API billing model is lower transaction fees. If the dev only uses $2 of API fees, using a service like Stripe would eat up 18% of the income. Another benefit is that when you do net-30 usage based billing, you always have to be concerned that the card might be maxed out or invalid by the time the bill gets charged. With 21, you can be sure that the bill will get paid since the Bitcoin is locked up in escrow until the transaction is processed.
- bobwaycott 10y agoGood point. Wasn't thinking about fees. Thanks.
- lucaspiller 10y agoYou could always have them pay up front, which is what pretty much all telephony services like Twilio do, as fraud is high in that market. You could even have them pay up front with Bitcoin to avoid the CC fees.
- kolinko 10y agoWith Bitcoin and 21 you can set up payments within hours, if not minutes. If you wanted to set up a traditional CC, you'd need to write the whole billing and tracking system, and so on. Managing all this is cost-prohibitive for smaller solutions. Oh, and with CCs there are chargebacks, so you can never be sure that the money will actually arrive on your account. This virtually rules out any kinds of services where it costs you real money to run. E.g. if you want to create mechanical-turk API, good luck. Someone will pay with a stolen CC, ramp up $10k in bills, and then do a chargeback.
- 10y ago
- NKCSS 10y agoWeird that the code uses 'two1', but the domain is 21.co and they have not registered two1.co...
- milkey_mouse 10y agoPython module names cannot start with a number.
- NKCSS 10y agoI know, this is true for more languages; just makes for a bad branding choice/planning.
- ssharp 10y agoThe test I use to understand most "but with Bitcoin!" ideas is simple: imagine the application "but with dollars". In this case, 21 isn't using Bitcoin is some way that makes it substantially different than what could already be done. If a person wanted to, they could create an API marketplace just like this, and charge 1 cent, or fractions of a cent, per transaction. Rather than turn your computer into a bitcoin mining botnet node, you load your account with a larger credit card payment to pay for it. Meanwhile, the marketplace collects the fees and distributes it to the various API owners' accounts, which can then be withdrawn once the account reaches some threshold, say $5. Here, 21 is essentially doing the same thing. Although they discuss being able to do on-chain or off-chain transactions, putting a tx on the blockchain for every $0.01 zipcode lookup is completely ridiculous and the success of such an application would essentially gridlock the blockchain, so accomplishing these types of micropayments has to be done off-chain. They're ultimately acting as a middle man between payer and payee, just like most fiat marketplaces are. 21's strategy doesn't seem terrible if you make a lot of assumptions about what role Bitcoin will play in our future. I personally think they're substantially off-base and that a world where devices have to constantly mine Bitcoin and send and receive micropayments to accomplish trivial things seems like more of a burden than a benefit. I should also say that you have to think quite a bit about what 21 is doing and make a lot of additional assumptions on their end in order to even say their strategy looks good. So far, they've released a very expensive Raspberry Pi with a hideous miner attached to it and this API marketplace where their featured API is a $0.01 zipcode lookup. I've been working on a side-project that requires me to do lookups on zipcode data and it took me all of 10 minutes to download that for free from the internet and drop it into a database. I get that they're trying to ship, but why no ship with something people would actually want to use?