Qualcomm funds startup to use Bitcoin for Internet of Things

[ElectricMucus]

Loool

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/04/30/2127543/meet-the-company-that-wants-to-put-a-bitcoin-miner-in-your-toaster/

tl;dr They want to offer cost-free consumer devices, mining bitcoin to pay for the cost of the device. All, of course based on difficulty and bitcoin prices from last year.

[xDan]

Loool

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/04/30/2127543/meet-the-company-that-wants-to-put-a-bitcoin-miner-in-your-toaster/

tl;dr They want to offer cost-free consumer devices, mining bitcoin to pay for the cost of the device. All, of course based on difficulty and bitcoin prices from last year.

That's really... awful? I'm finding it hard to believe that article.

[vm_mpn]

Loool

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/04/30/2127543/meet-the-company-that-wants-to-put-a-bitcoin-miner-in-your-toaster/

tl;dr They want to offer cost-free consumer devices, mining bitcoin to pay for the cost of the device. All, of course based on difficulty and bitcoin prices from last year.

That's really... awful? I'm finding it hard to believe that article.

Toasters are probably a bit of a stretch but I do see micro miners / Bitcoin nodes being built-in on some home smart devices that already have CPUs and wi-fi controllers. Why not?

[ElectricMucus]

Loool

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/04/30/2127543/meet-the-company-that-wants-to-put-a-bitcoin-miner-in-your-toaster/

tl;dr They want to offer cost-free consumer devices, mining bitcoin to pay for the cost of the device. All, of course based on difficulty and bitcoin prices from last year.

That's really... awful? I'm finding it hard to believe that article.

Toasters are probably a bit of a stretch but I do see micro miners / Bitcoin nodes being built-in on some home smart devices that already have CPUs and wi-fi controllers. Why not?

Cuz it has to be a dedicated ASIC on the SOC which would compete with silicon area of the rest of the device. That makes this thing especially uneconomical in comparison to dedicated devices.
The problem is the whole hybrid design aspect which doesn't live up to the promise of more than the sum of it's parts. Take hybrid laptop/tablet PCs for instance. They are both heavier than real tablet PCs, have less performance than laptops and are less durable than both. A set top box mining bitcoin would have less Gigahash/Watt while having for instance a slower GPU than a standard box.
Worse, if that set top box should have any chance of ever recouping the hardware costs it should have active cooling and a larger power supply to enable at least some reasonable hash rate both which are superfluous for a regular set top box consuming <10W

[vm_mpn]

Loool

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/04/30/2127543/meet-the-company-that-wants-to-put-a-bitcoin-miner-in-your-toaster/

tl;dr They want to offer cost-free consumer devices, mining bitcoin to pay for the cost of the device. All, of course based on difficulty and bitcoin prices from last year.

That's really... awful? I'm finding it hard to believe that article.

Toasters are probably a bit of a stretch but I do see micro miners / Bitcoin nodes being built-in on some home smart devices that already have CPUs and wi-fi controllers. Why not?

Cuz it has to be a dedicated ASIC on the SOC which would compete with silicon area of the rest of the device. That makes this thing especially uneconomical in comparison to dedicated devices.
The problem is the whole hybrid design aspect which doesn't live up to the promise of more than the sum of it's parts. Take hybrid laptop/tablet PCs for instance. They are both heavier than real tablet PCs, have less performance than laptops and are less durable than both. A set top box mining bitcoin would have less Gigahash/Watt while having for instance a slower GPU than a standard box.
Worse, if that set top box should have any chance of ever recouping the hardware costs it should have active cooling and a larger power supply to enable at least some reasonable hash rate both which are superfluous for a regular set top box consuming <10W

I hear you, but we are not talking about anything this powerful... Built-in IC could hash at 1GH and consume less than 0.5W, and with new tech around the corner to be even faster and more efficient. Now, multiply this by millions of smart devices around the world and you have one powerful decentralized network. IBM, CISCO, WHIRLPOOL, etc can now create their own mining pools those devices will hash to and get extra stream of revenue, perhaps sharing some with their customers. I just do not see anything technologically unreachable here I guess.

[ElectricMucus]

I hear you, but we are not talking about anything this powerful... Built-in IC could hash at 1GH and consume less than 0.5W, and with new tech around the corner to be even faster and more efficient. Now, multiply this by millions of smart devices around the world and you have one powerful decentralized network. IBM, CISCO, WHIRLPOOL, etc can now create their own mining pools those devices will hash to and get extra stream of revenue, perhaps sharing some with their customers. I just do not see anything technologically unreachable here I guess.

That only works out if 21inc can ensure providing the most efficient Bitcoin ASIC in the long run, if at any point the competition catches up it's over for them.
I don't even think it would work in the short run because as I recall the competition is already pretty close to the latest production node at 28nm. Thinking that they surpass the competition by a significant margin is unrealistic imho.
So what's left is a level playing field where electricity costs make up more then half of the value of mined Bitcoins in the latest design. I already posted about the economics of scale, meaning that in principle a dedicated larger Bitcoin miner will always be more efficient than a small hybrid design.

But lets say they pull a rabbit out of their hat and arrive at >2gh/w wall plug efficacy. How long do you think would it take the competition to catch up and even surpass them? How can they hope to remain providing the most efficient design considering the economics of scale? Keep in mind that, right now the break even point for new mining hardware is close to 8 years. (If price and difficulty stays the same)

[vm_mpn]

I hear you, but we are not talking about anything this powerful... Built-in IC could hash at 1GH and consume less than 0.5W, and with new tech around the corner to be even faster and more efficient. Now, multiply this by millions of smart devices around the world and you have one powerful decentralized network. IBM, CISCO, WHIRLPOOL, etc can now create their own mining pools those devices will hash to and get extra stream of revenue, perhaps sharing some with their customers. I just do not see anything technologically unreachable here I guess.

That only works out if 21inc can ensure providing the most efficient Bitcoin ASIC in the long run, if at any point the competition catches up it's over for them.
I don't even think it would work in the short run because as I recall the competition is already pretty close to the latest production node at 28nm. Thinking that they surpass the competition by a significant margin is unrealistic imho.
So what's left is a level playing field where electricity costs make up more then half of the value of mined Bitcoins in the latest design. I already posted about the economics of scale, meaning that in principle a dedicated larger Bitcoin miner will always be more efficient than a small hybrid design.

But lets say they pull a rabbit out of their hat and arrive at >2gh/w wall plug efficacy. How long do you think would it take the competition to catch up and even surpass them? How can they hope to remain providing the most efficient design considering the economics of scale? Keep in mind that, right now the break even point for new mining hardware is close to 8 years. (If price and difficulty stays the same)

I thought 21 was developing application layer for those smart devices or ICs (Qualcomm in particular). I really do not know what kind of hardware is in the pipeline but judging by KnC they are already on the way to 16nm with 0.07 / GH efficiency (ref: https://www.knccloud.com/blog/archive)

[ElectricMucus]

I'm skeptical of that claim of 16nm considering most consumer devices aren't even at that scale. But if it even has a remote merit I can't see how 21inc could compete.