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https://medium.com/@21dotco/a-bitcoin-miner-in-every-device-and-in-every-hand-e315b40f2821 (https://medium.com/@21dotco/a-bitcoin-miner-in-every-device-and-in-every-hand-e315b40f2821)

https://21.co/ (https://21.co/)

So who is paying for the power? 21 mentions talk of subsidizing pieces of hardware by including a Bitcoin miner - however this costs much more in power while it will generate less and less bitcoin the longer the device exists. This essentially costs the user more money in the long run.

Someone said they were thinking of putting mining chips in mobile phones. I cannot understand how draining their batteries faster will be an improvement. I heard mining viruses often alert people to their presence by draining Android phone's batteries in less than an hour. How can mining chips in phones be profitable without excessive power drain?

You do realize that the power cost would be negligible. What's with everyone's obsession with the power costs?

Negligible or not, the cost of running the mining chip would exceed its benefit.

The user will get a percentage of mined bitcoin.  And I believe the idea is that the hardware itself will be super cheap.  Like new moto x is $500.  Or $250 with bitcoin chip.  For example.

The problem is not hardware price, but energy costs. And the end user will lose more dollars in electricity bills than bitcoins from mining.

Battery life is a big problem for mobile phones too. Some modern smart phones are so power hungry they struggle to last a day without a recharge. If they start mining on battery power their batteries will probably go dead in far less than a day.

The most surprising thing is that people have invested millions of dollars into this horrible idea. I keep thinking that here must be more to it that isn't obvious.

Its not a horrible idea for the investors... i can't say the same for the consumers.

It reminds me of the IPOs held here. The investors might find they lose a considerable percentage of their investments if no manufacturers want to put mining chips into their toasters. They might consider adding network connectivity to a toaster too expensive to implement.

Don't underestimate the stupidity of consumers.  Most people don't understand mining or the power costs and they won't do the research.  "New smartphone for $100?  Where do I sign!"

New battery technology will make the new chip requirements insignificant.

It doesn't even seem the savings for the devices will go to the consumers. From what I understand, all 21 inc is doing, is giving the chips away for free to manufactures. They're not subsidizing the costs for the other parts of the devices for the consumer, so the prices will remain the same, except now you get to spend your own money to give to 21 inc.

I could be misunderstanding this but...

Since when do we have to only run electrical devices that bring more revenue than their power cost? Since the cost is negligible then why does it matter that it will eat more power than what it will produce? And why do you only measure the bitcoins that the devices make? Why doesn't anyone think about the security that comes with it?


See my above reply. Nobody cares about a few extra dollars (<5$/month) on their power bill and nobody will care how many bitcoin will the device produce. They will care more about the added security of the bitcoin p2p network and the discounts that they will receive.


It's a good idea. Well having a mining chip in mobile phones seems a bit strange, but having them in routers seems like a very good idea to me. If they can pull it off on the mobiles in a way to not eat the battery fast then they are the winners.


It's how the iPhones got their success so I don't understand your point here.

How does it make their phones or toasters or ipads or whatever more secure? It wouldn't. It also wouldn't give them discounts. In fact, from what I understand, 21 inc wants to add various layers of costs to browsing the internet that we don't have now. Potentially just trying to go to google.com will cost you say 0.00001BTC. It's not bringing you savings, it's adding costs, and forcing you to pay them.

And again, just having btc doesn't make your device more secure. That's just silly. In fact, if I had 10000BTC on my laptop, chances are it's less secure since more people might try to hack it.

And finally, we don't run devices that bring revenue. However, they bring some other sort of benefit. This doesn't give ANY benefit. All it does is eat electricity. That's the difference.

The average user? Really? I don't see my mom or my siblings caring whether the Bitcoin network is strong or not.

People care even less about the security benefits than the additional cost per month.

This is a very innovative concept I must say...

I said it will make the bitcoin network more secure, not their appliances.

I don't know from where you got the information that 21 inc wants to add various layers of costs for browsing the internet. Maybe you would enlighten me.

How much revenue is the TV bringing to you? What about your router? This will bring a benefit. You will earn some satoshis. Less than the power cost, but it will be that small that you will not be able to get it from somewhere else.


They will care if they will want to use their earned satoshis.


And how much do you think that will be? I imagine it being less than 5$/month. Who cares about an extra 5$/month if they can afford a smartphone and a data plan for it?

Actually it might be ~1$/month and also people charge their smartphone at work and in various places. It will not be only in their homes.

My iphone will lose about 30-40% battery in 1 day without me even using it let alone with a chip in it.

Well now it can lose a perfect 100% in a day

Earned satoshis that make them lose money. I think it would be better for them (and everyone) to just use an exchange. They will get a way better rate for their bitcoins.

1. And how many people care about that? Pretty much none. Even for the people who do care, the network is decently secure right now. Very few people will spend their own money to secure the network. If they did, they still should buy their own ASIC; at least they'd get 100% of the bitcoins instead of only 25%.

2. It was what I gathered from the article on coindesk. Who knows, I may have misunderstood. http://www.coindesk.com/21-intel-bitcoin-mining-strategy/

3. Again, TVs, routers, give you a benefit. You can watch shows or access the internet. This gives you 0 benefit. "You will earn some satoshis" is not a benefit.

How about this: You pay me $1,000,000 USD, and I give you 1,000,000 Satoshis. You get a benefit, since you get satoshis.

It doesn't work that way, because you can buy it for a cheaper price on an exchange or elsewhere easily. Wasting electricity purely to help 21 inc mine doesn't give you any benefit.

You're thinking of this as a sort of rebate, like you had to spend the electricity anyway, so why not get some satoshis back. But that's not the case. the Miner requires additional electricity that you would not have used. So in effect, all its doing is taking your money and giving you back less.

People are missing the point.

Your smartphone won't mine on battery power. Your smartphone will mine when it's fully charged but still plugged into the power outlet. Let's say you leave your phone on your charger for 10 hours a day. Take 2.5 hours to charge, you have 7.5 hours of mining.

About the power costs: Will you really care if your smartphone uses $0.02 more worth of power per day?

21 will make money from their ecosystem, not from mining bitcoins.

Here are the benefits, according to the blog post:


The money generated by the phone is not likely to be more than $5 per year. Let's assume that a device has the equivalent of BitMain's latest chip, the BM1384, which has a hash rate of about 5 GH/s at about 1 W. Note that 1 W is rather high for a phone. At the current difficulty, 5 GH/s will generate about 0.02 BTC per year, currently worth about $5.



That is really just reassurance to the manufacturer that their incremental cost will be lower than they expect.


That has nothing to do with mining. Any wallet can do that.


That has nothing to do with mining. Any wallet can do that.


Mining $5 a year is not going to lower the cost of the phone by any significant amount.

Buying some satoshis from an exchanger has very big added costs compared to what you buy. The wire transfer cost may be bigger than what you buy. Think about that too. We are talking about satoshis that are worth less than 5$/month. Why would anyone bother to sign up and to send documents to an exchange when they can get them from their mobile phone? It's too complicated and pointless to use an exchange for such low amounts.


1. Fine I agree that the regular Joe might not care about the bitcoin security, but the network is far from decently secure right now. Someone with not that much money can disrupt bitcoin. 100M$ is not much at all for any government or for Goldman Sachs. Having a network hashrate in the tens of exahashes makes it almost impossible for anyone to disrupt bitcoin.

2. All I found in that article is this: "mobile phone chargers and USB hubs would seek to encourage micropayments in applications, while routers and game consoles would allow users to spend bitcoin for added bandwidth or on in-app purchases." which is decent. How did you got from added bandwidth to layers of costs for browsing?

3. I thought you are talking about a money benefit. What's with the sudden change? The TV or the router isn't bringing you any money benefit. Also having a 21 inc device will not bring you 0 benefit as you say. Check point 2 for the benefits.

Why should I pay you 1M$ for 1M satoshis? You are doing the reverse thing of what 21 inc is doing. They are not charging you a premium. They are giving you a discounted appliance with a small extra power requirement.

Nobody is taking your money to give you back less. You will get a discounted phone or appliance and you will have to pay a small extra amount on your power bill. And by small that means less than 5$/month in my opinion. Those money go to your electricity provider, not to 21 inc. Let's say you will pay 5$/month on power. I assume that the mined satoshis will be between 0.5 and 3$/month which you can use for various things like micropayments without any other hassle like an exchanger.


Yes people are missing the point because they are stubborn. But mining only when plugged would be a fail imo. Or at least for cell phones. Better to put the chips in routers because those things stay 24/7 plugged in the power outlet and to the internet.

Why would anyone bother to acquire just some satoshis, instead of a reasonable fraction of bitcoins (like 0.1 BTC, for example, for which you don't need any documents to get)? Getting just the satoshis is as useful as using faucets so much announced in these forums, which many knowledgeable people can assure you they are not worth the hassle (you don't even get a single penny after being hours in those sites).

It seems that you're trying to find a motivation of a hypothetical client of this product, a motivation that I see unrealistic.

Not going to quote all that, so RoadStress,

Please explain how this will be better than buying bitcoins from an exchange. Where's the benefit? I can buy bitcoins cheaper from an exchange if that's what I wanted. Why do I have to go through the trouble of buying a 21inc enabled device, then spend a lot of extra money, wait a year and not have enough satoshis for a single lunch meal?

Finally, I'm just going to say that you're saying other people are being stubborn when you're the one being stubborn. That's why you misunderstand people's points; I never said anything about financial gain from TVs or routers. You just assumed that because you're arguing against what you THINK people are saying, not what they're actually saying.

Coins mined today may be similar to electric cost... if they are not exchanged right away the benefits should increase over time.

Well for start we don't even know if the user will directly keep the satoshis or if they will have some sort of credit on their account. The more I think about it the more I'm inclined to believe that the users will not keep a wallet. Having some sort of credit is much easier for both the user and 21 inc.

But let's say I want to buy a game that costs 3$. Why should I go and spend 23$ or the equivalent of 0.1 BTC to buy something worth 3$? Maybe I don't have 23$, but I have 3$. What if I want an additional 100MB of internet on my phone this month only? Why should I go and to some other transactions when I can just use my credit to buy the 100MB? Less friction, less problems. Easy life.

I am not trying to find a motivation. I am only trying to make you see that there are many alternatives to your negative way of thinking. There are some good things that will come with these devices. Why do we/you only have to see the negative ones?


So there aren't any layers of costs for browsing. It was just your imagination. I am glad we figured this one out!

I have explained above why is this better than buying bitcoins from an exchange. What you see as trouble of buying a 21inc enabled device I see as a benefit to the trouble of getting bitcoins from an exchange. I see more friction when using an exchange than using your 21inc enabled device. I see as spending extra money when using an exchange for various micropayments (under than 5$).

How are you spending a lot of extra money when using the 21inc enabled device? I don't get it and I don't expect you to reply just as you did with the layers of costs for browsing. The 21 inc enabled devices aren't here to provide anyone with a free meal. They are here to provide different things. I may not have explained better, but your view on this is very limited. Don't view it as a regular mining device, because it's not.

You never said anything about the financial gain from the TVs or routers, but odolvlobo said: "Negligible or not, the cost of running the mining chip would exceed its benefit." and you jumped into that discussion when you replied to my reply :) I just replied that not all appliances that we have in our homes bring us a direct benefit that is more than the power consumed by them.

My conclusion is that I see this a a very good thing for bitcoin and for users. You don't see it the same because of some non-existing issues from my point of view and while I am stubborn in real life I am very open when it comes to tech and Bitcoin. I want to see this happening! You (and others) on the other hand are reluctant.

Can not see where this is going, I guess many consumers will just dig out coin and formatted the mobile phone, making bitcoin less and less  ;D

Good job on your plethora of ad hominem attacks.


You spend more on electricity than the value of the bitcoins you get back. Therefore the cost of getting bitcoins from 21inc devices is greater than the value of the bitcoin. By definition. If you don't get that, there's not much more to say.

I can get bitcoins cheaper and faster from exchanges, from doing contract work, from localbitcoins, from mining with my own ASIC, and potentially a hundred other ways as bitcoin infrastructure improves.

What are the benefits that I personally get from a 21 inc device? I'm not altruistic enough to spend my money lining the pockets of 21 inc execs and investors, nor am I altruistic enough to spend my own money helping bitcoin's security.

I want a concrete benefit that I can get from 21 inc device that I can't get elsewhere. Otherwise, why would I use it?

If I recall from the original leak the "equipment" will be offered at a substantial discount... so the initial price should draw more interest than the minor mining/electrical cost & benefits.
I see more reason to be optimistic vs. disappointed.

21 inc is there to make money. That's why investors invested so much money in this company.

So think about it. Who are they making money off of? Their consumers, of course. There's no way they'll offer a bigger discount than the amount they'll earn back. Which means consumers lose.

Unless they're providing some other form of value, like TVs or routers do, as per RoadStress' examples. Every electric device we have currently gives us some value, which is why we're willing to sacrifice financially to use them. What value does 21 inc provide to the consumer? It's not financial. So what is it? I can't see it.

So pointing out the false/wrong things that you say is received as a direct attack? Ok. Keep the false statements coming.

Humans always pay more for a product. It's like saying that everyone should only buy stuff from the super/hypermarkets because otherwise they will pay an added cost for that item. We always do that and when we are talking about very small amounts the added cost is really insignificant! Judging by your opinion you would like that nobody buys 21 inc products while I would like to have those products in as many hands as possible!

Don't compare your life style with others. While you can get bitcoins using all those methods maybe there are people who don't want to use your methods. Why not leave them to pay more for their satoshis? Why do you want to restrict how people get their coins?

"nor am I altruistic enough to spend my own money helping bitcoin's security" That's one main reason why you would want 21 inc devices to succeed. So you won't be required to invest your own money into bitcoin's security. I see it this way: Let's say we need 1B$ for bitcoin's security. We can either have a group of ~100k people that pay for the security or we can have 100M people that pay for the security. Which one would you choose?


Again speaking from your imagination? Do you have their business plan? Share it with us please. Why do you think that the only reason is to make money of the consumers? Don't get me wrong. Maybe they will do money from the consumers in a way, but there are also other methods to do money as a company. You can make money from B2B too. If facebook can make money without asking money from the consumers then other companies can do it too!

It's just that the positive aspects of this don't seem to work in a real scenario, at least from my perspective. When you say, I want to buy a $3 game, there's effectively no reason to spend $23 on a $3 game, but spending $23 is not for the game, it's for exchanging currency. And people usually exchange currency in bigger amounts, not in $3 chunks.

If you have an “extra credit” that you can spend on more Internet connection... how did you get your extra credit in the first place? From that phone that is sucking your electricity bill? When you see the whole picture, that “extra credit” is really negative. The only way to get the extra credit for real is not investing in such device in the first place.

People have their own insights and the investors must've seen a big opportunity on this 'horrible idea'. Honestly, I don't hate this project but I'm not going to invest in it as well. The concept is great but as I said, not everyone is into this idea.

You don't see how these kinds of statements are completely unnecessary and rude? How they are attacks without any basis? You're helpless.

You could've offered counter arguments against mine by giving an example of how 21 inc could make money without taking advantage of consumers.

You could've offered examples of how 21 inc devices would be beneficial.

Instead, you choose to attack me, saying my statements are false, saying that I'm forcing people my lifestyle, saying i'm imagining things or whatever other crap you came up with. What a troll. You haven't directly answered any of my arguments, only made statements on me.

It doesn't matter even if I make false statements or whatever. That doesn't make your arguments true. You can't point out the benefit of 21 inc to the consumer. All you can do is attack people who have doubts about 21 inc's business. So sad. I'm done responding to you, troll.

It's similar to a loan without interest... cheap upfront cost... they make up the difference in mining profits...
As an example your electrical cost may be offset by a higher grade appliance with energy star rating.
It's good for folks that can't afford the upfront cost or don't want to rack up finance charges.
Perfect for renters that have utilities included.
I'm sure 21 could also attract purchase volume discounts (buyers club).
Bottom line is we don't have all of the details... 21 & their investors would be foolish to roll this out without tangible benefits to the end users.

See, this is a good argument. Clear and logical point without personal attacks.

It depends on whether they'll really subsidize for the whole device, or only for their chip. Their calculated cost per bitcoin is only $7.45, so I'd assume the discount consumers get will not be that big. In fact, this Leads me to believe that they're not subsidizing the cost for the consumer at all, only making it free for hardware producers. Of course, I could be wrong.

So I agree. We don't have enough details. If you dig back to the other thread when the first rumours were out, I was actually quite supportive of 21 inc. A lot of the recent details doesn't seem like very good news to me though, but only time will tell.

Well I'm expecting this to work for the same reasons that you don't expect it to work :) What a strange situation right?

That's my reasoning too. If you want to buy a 3$ game why should you be required to have 23$ in order to buy from an exchange? You can easily use your 3$ credit to buy your game. Job done. No other hassle.


KnC was advertising 0.07W/GH at chip level. While I don't believe them let's assume a 0.1W/GH. Do you know how much power does a cell phone use in standby and while using it for facebook or whatsapp?


You stated that 21inc wants to add various layers of costs to browsing the internet that we don't have now. Please prove it! If you can't prove it then it's just either lies or your imagination. Correct?

Also you stated that buying a 21inc enabled device will make people spend a lot of extra money. The a lot remark is, again, either lie or your imagination. Correct?

Those are not attacks. It's called reality and debunking your myths! If you can't handle them then stop spreading lies/false information and keep it to yourself. Some people might believe you and that is hurting me.


Well I have provided counter arguments, but you are so pissed off that you simply don't see them. Here they are again:


Yes I know it is a bit general saying B2B, but I find it to be on par with your argument of "taking advantage of customers". I will try more: while I really suck on doing business in general I think that an example of doing B2B as 21inc is simply an affiliate discount/bonus from Cisco for bringing sales. While I don't find this scenario real I'm just saying that there are a lot more possibilities than the customers. Also we must not ignore the fact that while they have the most money invested they are trying to address the masses. They are the first bitcoin company that is directly targeting the masses of non-bitcoin people. All other companies are targeting bitcoin people and that is also seen in the announced discounts. This doesn't seem like a plan to take advantage of the consumers at all to me. Or at least not in a direct way. I see it in a way that people will not care. Just like Facebook is doing it or Google or Skype and so on. There are MANY companies that don't take advantage of the consumers. Those are your best counter examples!

Again, I would like to remind you that I have pointed out the benefits of 21 inc to the consumer. Look in the previous posts.

And what you see as attacking I'm seeing as stopping the false information.

No, you don't understand. Spending $3 and spending $23 is in two totally different situations. It's like asking, “If I want to buy a $5 hamburger, why should I spend $200 on a dining table?” Well... no, you don't. You are buying a hamburger, not a dining table. How did you even come up with that connection?

From the redundant topic:

Well, the consumer obviously will be paying for electricity consumption.
Sure, it will cost the user more IF - and only IF - they choose to get one of them devices.

Hmm, well, if this thing actually does work, and consumers do decide to go for these devices,
that would mean that 21 Inc would have an advantage over other mining farms/operations as they would save themselves the expenses of electric power.

However, other farms will continue to upgrade their equipment to the latest ASIC technology.
21 Inc, will be stuck with their existing technology and will continuously need to manufacture new appliances.

I don't know if this will work out for them in the long run.

What do you guys think?

Too much uninformed speculation here, so let's clear out the trash.

0) Start out by ignoring smartphones for a moment, because the power issues are significant enough that only in special cases (ie plugged in) will it make sense. Let's looks at other use cases first, specifically non-portable always on devices like routers.

1) 21s chipset technology will be trojan horsed into devices everywhere, at no additional cost to any customer. So you get the technology onto every device you have, courtesy of Qualcomm, Intel and Cisco, plus Chinese manufacturers for FREE. They can do this because adding some an instruction set to a chipset or ASIC is very near costless, if you only consider the marginal cost, ie if you're already building the chip for a router, adding an additional instruction set is a like a few cents of additional cost.

2) AirBnB for chips. The 21 team came from Counsyl, Counsyl came from Vijay Pande's lab. Vijay Pande, was the creator of Folding@Home. So you see, if you're paying 200 bucks for a router, which you only use the 6 waking hours of the day you're at home, then for 18 hours a day, those chips are idle. So that's unused computing power, which could be used for something like folding proteins... or mining bitcoins. Yes it uses power. But hey, you've already paid the capital expenditure for it. You're already paying the operating expense for the router while it is idle, ie vampiric power and uptime. So if you run the Bitshare chip, all you need to pay is for marginal power cost.

3) A lot of Bitcoin mining cost mathematics can get turned upside down if there is no capital cost. Ie if you don't have to earn back the cost of the hardware, then you only have to make more Bitcoin than electricity prices (and in this case, only more than marginal electricity use).

4) This idle hardware issue is actually a pretty large one. Remember that the Internet for the most part is built to handle surge or peak capacity. That's true of everything from data centers to Google. All that computing capacity is idle most of the time right now.

5) Data center costs (http://www.storagecraft.com/blog/data-centers-costs-ownership/)

The cost percentages break down as follows:

Electricity: 20 percent
Engineering and Installation Manpower: 18 percent
Power and Server Equipment: 18 percent
Facility Space: 15 percent
Service and Maintenance: 15 percent
HVAC Equipment: 6 percent
Project Management: 5 percent
Rack Hardware: 2 percent
System Monitoring: 1 percent

Assuming utilization of 20% stepping up to 60% over a 10 year period with, average 40% utilization.

6) Based on 5), if Bitshare pushes up utilisation to 80% average, marginal electricity costs would go up at most by 20% of total costs. Meanwhile they've saved 80% of the cost of mining, which is the capital cost.

7) Remember Bitcoin mining is an embarassingly paralell problem, which means there are fewer economies of scale running it in a datacenter vs a router chip. So the analysis in 5) and 6) will hold at the router chip stage.

8) Remember also that data centers are already super efficient in terms of capital cost per compute cycle. When compared to consumer electronics, there is no physical distribution cost, no marketing cost etc.

9) In total, basically the marginal electricity cost is small enough that 21 thinks they can mine Bitcoins profitably enough, at current prices, as long as they don't have to bear the capital costs of the chips. In fact, they thing that it's going to be so profitable, that they plan to to take 75% of the Bitcoins mined, and leave you with 25%.

10) That 75% of Bitcoins mined is going to be distributed back to their partners, ie Qualcomm, etc for profits. If this is a profitable business for them, they will start packing in more and more powerful chips into consumer devices. Because utilization of the chips is going to go from 20%-60% to 80%-100%.

11) Hardware as a Service. You pay electricity costs for the mining, and Qualcomm subsidizes the chip costs, over time capital costs for the chips will come down because someone else is paying for it.

12) Over time, 21 only makes real money if Bitcoin becomes huge. They want to be a payment processor, they need volume of transactions. They are not interested in holding the Bitcoin as an investor.

13) So that leads to the other part of the business plan, the 25% share to you. That share, which is basically "free money", allows developers to provide interesting and innovative applications on the Bitcoin platform. Many of these applications may be at first machine to machine applications.

I chose to reply to you because yours is a good question that needs to be solidly answered.

1) First see my post above, the relevant way to calculate the cost per mined Bitcoin is the marginal cost of electricity for Bitcoins mined. You get the hardware for free because every chip in every device you own will already carry it by arrangements between the manufacturer and 21. From the 100+ chips in your BMW, to the Nest, Dropcam and every other device.

2) You only choose whether to devote spare computing cycles to Bitcoin mining or not. The Bitcoins produced by those spare compute cycles might already be spoken for. For Eg, imagine a Dropcam with cloud 7 days video recording for free if you turn on the Bitshare chip, vs USD5/month if you don't. As a consumer, you may only receive a prompt "Free cloud recording (Warning: Higher electricity costs)". No mention of Bitcoin anywhere.

3) There's all kinds of "FREE" shit on the Internet right now. Google, Facebook etc etc right? These guys are all altruistic guys who give away stuff and don't make any money right???

4) The Internet today runs on this ad supported model, what VCs call the two sided marketplace. Consumers get content and services for free, while third parties like advertisers pay for access to consumers. Google and Facebook sit in the middle and take a toll on each of these transactions.

5) 21 may enable a new kind of Internet, where, people actually pay minute amounts directly, in return for avoiding all those ads.

6) A lot of this stuff may actually be pretty invisible to customers. You won't need to know what Bitcoin or Bitshare is, or who 21 is. All you need to know is that you can use the Dropcam's Cloud Recording for Free, or Facebook's Ad Free Mode.

7) In short, you already paying for lots of shit you don't know about. Except they playing you like a fiddle, em boys at GOOG and FB, laughing all the way to the bank while you think you getting FREE SHIT. So 21 comes along, and they giving you more FREE SHIT, and you can use that FREE SHIT to avoid the FREE SHIT from FB and GOOG.

Thanks vanderghast for putting what I said into different words :)

You're welcome  ;D. Someone had to kill the power usage argument dead. Kept popping up every half hour.

This is awful. I'm already paying for my Internet. Now I will have to pay even more?

A similar promise was made by pay TV when it first started, that it would be “TV with no ads!”. What happened to that?

This is really the same as using a faucet you going to be spending more time and energy then its worth.

it is worse actually, one good faucet can give you 1-3k per hour(the best one even more), with 10gigahash/s you are getting only 10k per day, so unless those device are running 50 giga at very least there is no comparison, not to mention the electricity(not from the chip itself maybe, but from the whole device that need to run to be able to mine) unless you can mine without running it, somehing like two switches...

Yes that is one dumb argument.


10k? Maybe millions :D

I like the concept. Mining should be distributed, not in the hands of a few big players, as it is now. The profits will be negligible, but who cares? mining for profit is over, this solution will maintain the network. Until they prove themselves to be a total scam that is....

The benefit doesn't come to the user...it will be virtually transparent to the user as the gains from micro hashing will be nothing! These devices will simply make BTC the most decentralized and robust network on the face of the planet. The real advantage is to the Bitcoin holders.

I was very incredulous when I first read about this idea.  As many others have pointed out, power costs money, batteries in mobile phones will get run down as the chip mines, and the very high anticipated "take" of 75% by 21co seemed to make this nonsense.  (I had not thought of even crappy faucets as a better deal, but that is a good point as well.)

Then I realized that the target market is people who don't know anything about bitcoin.  All they will see is "free stuff for just using my X" and so it may work out.  I do think it may help adoption and that is a good thing.

In other words, their business model depends on deception and ignorance.

"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."


BTW, I like the concept, but it has to make economic sense in order to succeed.

Now this is a subject that we should focus on and be prepared for. If they go live with ASICs in routers we will see a major increase in hashrate. How do we handle that? Also how do we handle the fact that 21inc will have most of the freshly generated coins? I'm assuming that consumers will NOT hold their satoshis directly. Their share will go to 21inc and they will have some sort of credit. Having the consumers directly hold the satoshis from the stars makes it very complicated and bad things will definately happen.

We should probably wait to review the specs and GH/Watts before judging them. It may be beneficial to the consumer , them and the bitcoin marketplace.

My primary concern deals with centralization of mining and if they will allow the end user to select their own pool for the 25% in hashing that is shared with the user. Hopefully they realize we will not tolerate one company or pool to control 51% or more of the hashrate . If they cared about the ecosystem they would allow mining to be done on a p2p pool by default not controlled by any one entity.

I am hopeful they will make the right decision as several of the large investors in 21 Inc are both libertarians and heavily invested in bitcoin where they are concerned for the longterm viability.


There is no way for traditional miners to compete with their margins. They should immediately start negotiating with other companies like IBM, InTEL, google if they wish to survive.


If Qualcomm starts giving out free routers and extremely cheap androids than other companies like Samsung and Apple will have to copy their business model. It would be likely to expect that multiple of these companies to compete for a share of these bitcoins. As long as the the ASICs are being produced by several competing companies or partnerships not in collusion I am Ok with them fighting over for a share of them remaining 32% of bitcoins as those profits will go towards high tech jobs to roll out new products and services for our ecosystem.

Why did this instantly go to money when 'a satoshi' could be so much more? A deed, a title, a marriage certificate... it could be a light switch turned on and off, a snapshot from a security camera, transactions worth securing for the next fifty years more. Any and every packet is a potential blockchain transaction. Not all on the bitcoin blockchain, but somehow supported by it, maybe through something like ethereum. - basically, i see 21.io coming out with their own coin or allowing customers to chose which blockchain they support by programming the device. i'm just speculating.

Well, a satoshi is either a currency or asset to pay for those contracts or smart properties. It is a unit of account based upon its design.

Vitalik plans on switching ethereum off of PoW fairly quickly to some yet to be decided version of TaPoS so I doubt it will be ethereum. Being that many of those investors are highly invested in bitcoin alone I highly doubt they will be messing with any other alt as well.  

Then they should fit right into the bitcoin ecosystem  ;)

There are two ways to obtain satoshis: you can buy 1 million satoshis for about $2.50, or you can mine them for about $10 in electricity with a 21dotco device. Your choice.

Hey that's cool. How did you get your hands on their investor preso? I heard there's a full 84 pages to it, anyone seen the rest of it?

May be I'm just a nut job, but you make me want to break something beautiful. The point of this deployment is not to fuckin' generate a bitcoin from mining from these appliances. It's to bolster the network on a scale that's unimaginable. The point is that it will provide the most robust computational infrastructure on the planet. The value of that is immeasurable. So buy some fuckin' bitcoin, feel blessed that you can contribute to the network by doing the things you normally do, and forget about the stupid electricity costs.

It's a paradigm shift.

 

Ask the investors what the point of this venture is. They will say it is a business, and the point is to make money. The strategy is to get people like you to donate money to the "cause", and they get to keep 75%.  If their purpose were really to bolster the network, they could have taken the $116 million, bought 250,000 AntMiners, and then given them away.

Furthermore, they aren't really going to "bolster the network". Their plan is to build a mining pool that could surpass 51%, and unlike other pools, you can't switch to another pool if you don't like their policies. In other words, their goal is to centralize Bitcoin mining, and put themselves at the center.


Just to be clear. I am all for bolstering the network and providing a robust computational infrastructure, but it has to make economic sense or it will fail.

So we are going to have a lot more people, who would be bringing their toasters to work.  ;) ... I can already see a "Bitcoin enabled" device in every office.

It will be a novelty item for Nerds to brag about. {My toaster makes me money... what about you?}

I just cannot see, how they would be able to offset the increased cost of the device and the extra electricity it will use, to reach a ROI. {The goal seems to be Bitcoin awareness and securing the network}

Let's see how this pan out....  ::)   

i don't think this project will be applyed to a non internet device, i mena a toaster does not have any possible connection, how you cna mine with it?

this whole thing is more concurrently with devices that can be connected to internet

Blindness, blindness everywhere.

Electricity costs? its a MOBILE device.

Battery power? If you guys havnt read about the instant recharge power device then lol.

So Naive.

- Mayer Amschel

I cant imagine that working. Those asics need space in the hardware and surrounding hardware to make it work. So the cost will be higher than the simple asic chip.

And as far as the difficulty goes... up to which magnitude has these chips to be better in order to be worth it for more than 2 or 3 months? Are all the other miner creators stupid and 21 found the holy grail of asic mining?

Maybe they plan to have VERY low production cost by a huge amount of asics being needed. But even that... its hard to believe.


I think youre right. But because of that reason it will be a very bad thing. Because at one point people will realize that they got scammed out of their power cost so that others could earn money. If that will be marketed silently then this will be a problem at some point.


So your power, coming out of wall, is free for you or what do you want to say? Does someone other pay it for you? If so, yes, then you could scam this person out of their energy.

When this stuff comes out. I'll just start "accidently" forgetting my stuff at high traffic locations. HEHE.

Poor people will be all happy they found a "free" usb charger, but little will they know I already put my payment address in it. Muhahahahhahahahahhah.

OK. I was misinformed and apologies for being crass. If the consumer doesn't have the autonomy to point their devices (even in the fruitless case of solo mining) to a place of their choosing or creation, I need to re-evaluate this idea.

That is until they compare electricity bill.  ::)

this is awesome!!!

i want my fridge to mine... toaster ...light bulbs...LOL hahahahahah

Although the devices will be spread far and wide, all of them will be pointed to 21's pool.

If it really goes enormous and they make themselves not too far off the google of BTC, I wonder what happens if they decide they don't like the halving schedule so much...

At that point other Bitcoin users and miners might be in a significant minority. 21's Bitcoin might waltz off into the sunset while everyone else chugs down their modest little path.

All miners at present are 'conscious' and can point them wherever they like. 21 locks a huge amount of machinery in and most people aren't going to know or care what it's actually up to.