Bitcoin Forum

Have anyone looked into this group? According to some vague articles they have raise significant VC funding and "plan" to  make a series of announcements/applications to promote BTC mass adoption??

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/03/10/secretive-bitcoin-startup-21-reveals-record-funds-hints-at-mass-consumer-play/ (http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/03/10/secretive-bitcoin-startup-21-reveals-record-funds-hints-at-mass-consumer-play/)

http://www.ibtimes.com/21-inc-secret-bitcoin-startup-raises-116m-latest-funding-round-1842374 (http://www.ibtimes.com/21-inc-secret-bitcoin-startup-raises-116m-latest-funding-round-1842374)




Edit: According to metrics on Crunchbase, they are targeted towards chip design specifically for BTC hashing (Note their association with Qualcomm)

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/21e6 (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/21e6)



So for us, everyday BTC traders should we prepare for this? It wouldn't surprise me if we naturally moved to $300 range - But if this drives a more significant uptick should we be prepared for an Index closer to $380-$420 over next few weeks/month - just to be cautious?


EDIT: Here's the website for the stealthy group: https://21.co/ (https://21.co/)

Rumor: Putting Bitcoin ASICs in every device.  Bitcoin Mining in the Internet of Things.

Don't you need a fleet of warehouses and your own power plant to stand a chance of competing? Sounds like a fun gesture but not much else unless it's more of a node type of thing.

Why have a warehouse when other people can mine for you with their own electricity?  If a custom LCD monitor has one ASIC chip, and there are 1,000,000 that own that monitor it would be hashing on 'free electricity'.  You could split the profits or give the user an ad free experience.

It's an interesting assumption! Pooled mining to another level : )

10,000 asic devices vs 1?

Recently utorrent tried the same premise (albeit without ASIC)

lol, good one

That's what I thought first  ;D

But maybe a possibility in 10-15Yrs time?


I think these "announcements" from 21inc will be more related to useful applications that utilize BTC in the background and partnered affiliations to increase consumer adoption.

The economics of scale won't change in 15 years nor like... ever.

I agree, but open to see the evolution of BTC mining. Right now it looks like there will be more "mega mines" and VC/Angel money put into these large facilities.


So back on point, do you think the price index is likely to reach $400 within next 30 days? It'll have to be an innovative application/marketing hype!!

We've seen intermittent viability of small scale mining at the start of every change of the underlying technology. At the beginning of GPU, FPGA, and ASIC mining it was feasible to run a single machine at home for a while. And I'm very skeptical about the prospect of beating existing ASICs with a newer, better designed one by that order of magnitude. Even when 100mil are behind it.
So they are after buzz, I get it. Perhaps it'll drive the price up, perhaps it gets ignored... The thing is they are being intentionally obscure and I don't trust that.

I do not think the price will rise to $400 in the next 30 days. I think there may be a small increase in the price. The price broke $300 for a short time today, but $100 increase is a lot to be asking now.

I'm with you on this one - pending any further project news from this 21Inc group, have not seen anything interesting thus far..

but i hope it will be happen in the next 2 week :D

Agreed, a $100 increase would correlate with significant increase in demand within this time frame. It's possible, but would real need to be a very impressive suite of applications from this 21Inc group.


Interestingly, the last 2 times we breached $300, the price index rapidly dropped - I'm hoping we will progress/sustain above the $320 range this time, guess we'll have to wait and see.

I retail BTC everyday, so will keep buying back at current market. Worst thing for brokers like me, is to sell a lot then have to buy back at higher rate  :P

Haha, that's the spirit! Stranger things have happened bro. Guess if you are % trading frequently, just be sure you can liquidate your funds quickly (BTC:FIAT:>BTC) as we are in a slow uptrend. Perhaps this 21Inc will come good and blow us all away  8)

Thinking about it, some more, meh.
Given 100mil of funding and they don't have a very expensive looking web presence on a .com

Yeah bro, I looked them up to, but I'm not sure it is them? http://www.21inc.ca/index.php/en/ (http://www.21inc.ca/index.php/en/)  (these guys look like a Canadian-based network group)   Have i got the right website?

I think the price will not rise for that, but down

Here's the actual website for 21Inc that has been on the news this week:

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


Interestingly they have an active jobs page, from which we can infer a little about their plans??

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

The company will probably be a big deal. For one, the investor list is top notch. Additionally, @balajis (https://twitter.com/balajis) is a cofounder and c-level exec. For those who don't know him, he was a partner at Andreessen Horowitz (is leaving (http://a16z.com/2015/03/11/21/) now that 21.co is coming out of stealth), successful entrepreneur before that, and he also "...obtained BS, MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering and an MS in Chemical Engineering, all from Stanford" (source: http://blog.pmarca.com/2013/12/09/balaji-srinivasan/ ), so he's got the technical chops for this.

He's given a number of interviews over the last couple years, and talks a lot about bitcoin on twitter. One topic I've heard him bring up more than once is the idea of bitcoin enabling machine to machine payments (ie, the gazillion theoretical car-autopays-the-meter use-cases). So I think there's a decent chance 21 is working on an embeddable-in-anything low-power bitcoin-wallet-on-a-chip.

There's very little known information about them and especially on what they do. It sounds stealthy to me. The speculation is mainly on developing  consumer related Bitcoin products probably those related to security like wallets and hardware kind of thing. Regardless I hope it will give a boost towards bitcoin price.

Of course the ASIC job posting can be to mislead.

The 21inc team is top notch. Can't wait to see what they come up with.
Expect little price impact in the near term

cointerra's team was also supposed to be top notch...until it wasn't (operationally)

Another possibility is free POS hardware for merchants, subsidized by embedded mining hardware that 21 controls plus Peer to Peer lending platform.

Hmmm who exactly?

Wasn't their founder the lead designer of Samsungs chips or something

I hope 21Inc is not developing anything mining related but will do something beneficial for the bitcoin ecosystem.

founder

Cheers for the info Mel - could be really great for our BTC community, I'm looking forward for future announcements from this group

Part of the secrecy I thought might be due to product protection laws, as although BTC is somewhat a niche market, it still can be lucrative.
I wonder if they are also working on more governmental projects too?

I'm guessing it on Qualcomm chip(receiver) for satellite-based communication and payment system aka http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outernet
http://gizmodo.com/what-is-the-outernet-and-is-it-the-future-of-the-intern-1659647614

I'm impressed  the see how well the price copes,  I think it will do admirably well in 2015

Cheers for link, this is important! A year ago I was thinking the same - it's easy for us in "1st world" Countries with continually updated fibre-optic infrastructure to forget that basic internet is not available to the majority of habitable/occupied landmass. I used to work in very rural areas as a geologist and we would have to rely on our own ground satellite receivers to route internet access.
These LEO (Low Earth Orbit) networked satellites do have the capability to bring  Net connectivity everywhere - which will be powerful for the bitcoin community.
It will be interesting to see how much governmental vs private funding ratio there will be? My guess is that the major Telecommunications operators will most likely monopolize.

Hope so too Fox, though from reading posts on here - I'm gonna go out on a limb and say the majority believe ATH (All Time High's) might not be this year but more longer term, like 2017-2020.

( >$1300/BTC )

Innovation from 21Inc might take us $400+ short-term, over next few months. But that's purely my speculation : ) and thus far, no significant project news to date!

Likewise.

Another point... 21 is *bitcoin* focused. Not "cryptocurrency"....*bitcoin*. Think about the network-effect depth that widely distributed bitcoin-only hardware will bring.