It appears there may indeed be a useful case for this device...
How else do you enable true micropayment possibilities than by allowing ubiquitous access to mining?
These folks are very, very clever.
So you are suggesting their definition of microtransactions is less than 10 cents which is prohibitively expensive to send right now with fees being 2 pennies?
What does this hardware have to do with sending dust, why not just use one of many services like changetip to send microtransactions or is this going to be a decentralized caching layer for micro-transactions that doesn't use an off the chain solution(like the lightning network)?
Yes, I am honestly unsure about the specifics but I'm confident your second statement is close to what they're doing.
See my reply above and yes indeed the microtransactions they refer to will be less than 10 cents. We're likely talking satoshis here.
There are reasons why that is not possible and that would be a hack anyway.
By participating hashing power to 21inc mining pool (as negligible as it could be) they will aggregate all of their embedded chips and Bitcoin computer devices micropayments and include them into blocks they mine.
If that is the case , that is a creative solution that also allows bitcoin to scale more (If and only if the process is decentralized and acting like a caching layer). They are really horrible about explaining this simple idea in their marketing I do say.
Case use ... You are a songwriter and manage to convince 5% of the bitcoin users to buy your song for 1 penny in btc each allowing you to earn 2k in profit tax and itunes fee free . Rinse and repeat and earn a reasonable income, and probably much more by releasing through itunes only.
Hmm.. now this sounds exciting as any centralized offchain solution exposes one to the risk of taxes for earned income and counterparty risk. What is also interesting is this opens up a huge market demand for bitcoin as people will be excited to use itunes alternatives where music costs 1 penny a song instead of 99 pennies a song.
We certainly are reading between the lines however and may be delusionally optimistic.