Clearly the point of owning a 21-enabled device is not to make money mining, as several others have already pointed out. The idea is that at a sufficiently low power draw people might not object to the miner being there, provided the device offers enough value for money in other departments. The trick is to find an application that is synergistic with Bitcoin mining.
How about this, a device that combines the following features:
- Full Bitcoin node like
Bitnodes Hardware.
- Tor router like
Portal to provide high anonymity with fewer possibilities for exploits than running Tor on your own computer. Mainly interesting for those who have political motivations or are doing naughty things, but also a noble-sounding pretext ("helping dissidents in Iran").
- I2P router that does something similar for bandwidth-intensive applications that do not need to leave the darknet, such as file sharing or naughty Streamium streams that could benefit from increased privacy for both sender and receiver. Potentially attractive to a much larger group of people.
-
Meshnet router.
- Access point for selling bandwidth to strangers with phones with expensive data bundles using Bitcoin micropayments channels, as proposed by Mike Hearn.
There is synergy between several of these functions.
For example, if you want to sell bandwidth and want to avoid liability for what people are doing over your connection, Tor helps. Paid applications that rely on stealth Bitcoin micropayments would benefit from decentralisation and might be more willing to contribute financially, especially if it costs very little. People running such a node could still be seeking a profit, such as getting paid anonymously for hosting files. The mining costs could then be seen as an expense and overall the operation could still be profitable.
