
The 21 Bitcoin Computer - paulbaumgart
https://medium.com/@21dotco/the-21-bitcoin-computer-1d28d652b57b
======
zettahash
It sounds like a marketer got a little too excited and decided to name their
developer kit _The 21 Bitcoin Computer_ , not realizing the confusion they
were about to create.

My understanding is that 21 has created a board that fits on top of a
Raspberry Pi 2 to offer a miner, full bitcoin node, wallet, some fancy
hardware acceleration, and several development tools for engineers who are new
to bitcoin and want to experiment with building products on top of it.

It's only been an hour since all this news is coming out but so far I think
they're completely missing their target audience by dumbing down their
marketing material and selling preorders through Amazon.

~~~
tvladeck
I actually don't think a marketer touched this project at all.

If one did, they didn't do a great job defining the purpose of this device.
They didn't talk - or if they did, they didn't listen - to potential customers
about what pain point this could solve. They didn't define a positioning for
this product. Etc.

Sell goods for BTC? What about Stripe / Braintree?

Buy goods w/ BTC? What about buying BTC on Coinbase?

Mine BTC? There are more economical ways.

~~~
akhilcacharya
The only real value of 21's product _is_ power efficient mining. I'm
bewildered as to why they would focus on the buying or selling aspect.

~~~
fit2rule
Because this thing contains everything you need to operate in the Bitcoin
economy at all levels - mining, purchasing, selling BtC - in a smart little
easy to install package.

So I'm a small business owner in .. lets say, Morocco, or .. Laos, or Sao
Paolo, and I want to stop using US$ to purchase stuff from China.

This makes it very, very easy to do that.

------
vajrapani666
I met a few people from 21 in Potrero Hill at a coffee stand. When one of them
paid, I saw a bitcoin address and it struck up a conversation. I told them I
was interested in new things (and bitcoin as well), and they told me that
their startup is in stealth and they couldn't divulge any information about
it, but could send me a test to see if I had the right skills to continue the
process.

It was a multiple-choice test on HackerRank. It was all pretty simple stuff
related to general linux/bash/html/sql knowledge tons of questions about
bitcoin protocol. Having spent a few hack days in the past on it, i did
extremely well and went on to interview with the CEO.

It started to get funny, the CEO would only interview a candidate at 10pm on a
Thursday. "pretty busy during the daytime" they said.

Despite the red flag, I did it. We talked about bitcoin for about 40 minutes
straight and why I was into it. I got the impression from them that they were
onto something really huge, or that they think they are onto something really
huge that is going to massively flop. At the end of the call, I asked for any
hint into what the product I'm interviewing for does and was told it had to do
with hardware.

I feel like I got off the call pretty bewildered.

Glad this cleared things up!

------
powera
This is a TERRIBLE idea in my opinion. Apart from the blatant marketing LIES
(this will NOT get you free money, you will lose money on the electricity,
even the promotional material admits this in the fine print) this only claims
to do things that EVERY OTHER computer already does.

You can already use APIs in half a dozen programming languages to do every one
of the things they mention in this blog post, and you can do them for less
than 5 cents per hour on EC2 (which is $400/year [compared to $400 upfront +
electricity], but if you're running it for a year straight you can get it
cheaper at places other than EC2).

If this didn't have the magic buzzword of "Bitcoin" in the name and a
smorgasbord of people cross-promoting it for reasons I don't pretend to
understand, everyone would see that it's just an overpriced, under-powered
computer.

~~~
dang
"Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or
phrase, put _asterisks_ around it and it will get italicized."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
powera
Huh. Never realized that was an official rule for comments as well as
headlines.

~~~
dang
pg hates all caps.

(Edit: that might have been too laconic, but I thought it would be amusing to
make a comment with no capital letter. What I mean is that that's how the
policy originated.)

------
pkinsky
Not sure I like the name, I came into this thread expecting to read about a
computer built using 21 BTC worth of components.

~~~
logicallee
It's a particular problem in titles that use title case.[1] What I mean is
that in any such title, 21 Bitcoin Computer will read like 21 bitcoin
computer. I would argue that due to the _extremely_ unusual name (Edit: see
replies to this comment) our title should read "21 introduces 21 Bitcoin
Computer" or "21 Bitcoin Computer from 21" or something.

 _[1] Though editors in all media are slowly moving away from title case,
especially in newspapers (I mean as opposed to films and books) - the NYT and
WSJ are both still on title case, but not the USA Today, Boston Globe, SF
Chronicle, or, for that matter, FT.

HN is mixed: for example, out of the 30 articles currently on the front page,
22 are in title case, but 8 aren't. (There are no ambiguous ones currently,
such as a single word or a single word and then only numbers or prepositions.)

Reddit has completely moved to sentence case.

EDIT: I missed one, "Netflix Lemur" is ambiguous. Here's my sample/dataset:
[http://pastie.org/10436384*](http://pastie.org/10436384*)

~~~
pkinsky
The Bitcoin computer by 21, maybe. I hate to come into a thread about
something cool that someone built just to complain about the name, but it just
doesn't scan.

~~~
logicallee
can you name any other companies (or projects) that literally match [0-9]+? No
Googling :)

It would be as if "37 signals" had been called just "37". Oh, wait, they have
no reason to be confusing :)

By the way I wasn't among the people complaining - I just think a title with
some lowercase in it may be clearer. Maybe not though.

I was still wrong after reading the whole article and the whole article it
links. The name of the company is 21 (supposedly) and the name of this
computer is the Bitcoin Computer or maybe 21 Bitcoin Computer.

------
minimaxir
> _you can leave it plugged into the wall to provide a steady stream of
> Bitcoin_

This seems dishonest. How much $USD worth of Bitcoin could you realistically
produce in a day with a pocket-sized computer, net of the cost of electricity
used to mine it?

~~~
Sambdala
Saw a calculation that estimated it at $0.25 / day at current hashrates.

~~~
Phlarp
It'll be even lower by the Nov. 16th release date, if they manage to ship on
time.

If the past is any guide, that quarter a day will rapidly decay towards 0 as
the global hashrate continues to grow.

~~~
dest
> "that quarter a day will rapidly decay towards 0 as the global hashrate
> continues to grow"

The hashrate increase has been quite slow during the last months [1]. We are
far from the exponential-like increases during the bubbles.

[1]
[https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty](https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty)

~~~
logicallee
is this because some people (companies) are just not bothering to plug their
rigs in?

(i.e. some hash power is just leaving the network despite existing as
dedicated hardware good for nothing else.)

~~~
Phlarp
To some extent it's fallen off because we've reached (somewhat) of a plateau.
Originally all mining was done using CPU resources, but the first big jump up
in hashrate came as folks started to figure out GPU mining. As GPU mining grew
more popular, the hard core geeks started looking at FPGAs and eventually we
made it to full blown ASIC miners. The last big explosion of hashrate was
driven by the bulk of miners adopting ASIC hardware of one flavor or another.
Now that the majority of miners are on SHA256 ASICs the only gains to be made
are by shrinking the die and increasing the transistor count but even those
hard earned gains are going to be quickly diminished as ASIC hardware "catches
up" to Moore's law.

As for hash power leaving the network, if you are mining as a business then
you are 100% at the mercy of 1) how much you pay for electricity and 2) market
price for coins. Given how many schemes exist for stealing either computing
power or electricity I imagine the margins will converge on a negative number
at a large enough scale.

------
dchuk
Just like most developments in the bitcoin world, I'm having a lot of trouble
figuring out what this thing actually does and why I want it. Isn't the whole
major selling point of Bitcoin that it _isn 't_ physical and is instead
totally digital? What does a "bitcoin command line" even mean?

"With this pocket-sized device, if you are an entrepreneur or developer, you
can now instantly buy or sell digital goods and services at the command line
using Bitcoin." Isn't that already all possible with just bitcoin itself? Why
would I buy this thing?

------
jboggan
1) Take more VC money than you actually need to build a product [0]

2) Spend 80-90% of that to buy Bitcoin

3) Do things to drive adoption and popularize Bitcoin

4) Profit!

0 -
[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/21e6](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/21e6)

~~~
wmf
Wrapping your software in a $400 dongle seems like a really roundabout way of
driving Bitcoin adoption, but I suppose it will ensure that all the customers
are true believers.

------
natrius
You know how mobile networks made lots of money by letting third parties
charge things to people's cell phone bills? I think 21 is trying to build
carrier billing for everything. If everyone has a hundred dollars a month of
mining power plugged in, 21 can issue those people a credit line secured by
the ability to charge arbitrary, limited amounts to their electricity bills.

~~~
minimaxir
Carrier billing worked because there were _zero_ alternatives back in the day
and they could charge whatever they wanted. When App Stores became popular
with free/low-cost apps, carrier billing died out.

In this case, there is an alternative to the 21 computer known as _money_.

~~~
natrius
Unless you're paying with bitcoins, you can't just teleport money. You need to
transfer it via third parties. Credit cards do this and take a ~3% cut. If 21
can get its chips into every household, they can take a much smaller cut,
especially since the chance that a customer won't pay their bill is lower.
You'd have to unplug your mining chips to avoid a bill, which would instantly
notify 21.

They can charge money to people's electricity bills and pay no fee. That is a
competitive position.

~~~
Sanddancer
I can send money via various electronic fund transfer systems that do exist,
not just through credit cards. There even exist standards, like SWIFT, to do
this internationally. So yes, banks can transfer in a very similar way as
bitcoin.

------
miles
These two comments from the /r/Bitcoin thread [1] sum it up nicely:

"So it's an overpriced SHA256 ASIC attached to a Raspberry Pi? For $400?" [2]

"I'd rather just buy $399.99 worth of Bitcoin..." [3]

EDIT: Its first-listed "feature" on Amazon [4] seems disingenuous at best:

 _" Buy digital goods with the constant stream of bitcoin mined by a 21
Bitcoin Chip"_

especially since the makers themselves refute this in their FAQ [5]:

 _" Yes, you can indeed make a profit with the 21 Bitcoin Computer. However,
you would do so not by directly selling bitcoin, but by selling digital goods
_for_ bitcoin. That is, you are not going to get rich by immediately selling
the bitcoin mined by the device for offline currency, but you can potentially
do very well by selling digital goods and services to others for their
bitcoin."_

In other words, there will hardly be a significant "constant stream of bitcoin
mined" as the tech specs [6] make clear:

 _" the 21 Bitcoin Chip has an efficiency of approximately 0.16 Joules per
Gigahash and can calculate 50-125 Gigahashes per second"_

At the current difficulty, that would produce somewhere between 0.01289890 and
0.03224725 bitcoins per month [7]. Even if the difficulty remained constant,
it would take many years to recoup the initial $400 investment.

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3lucwl/21co_websit...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3lucwl/21co_website_has_just_been_updated_introducing/)

[2]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3lucwl/21co_websit...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3lucwl/21co_website_has_just_been_updated_introducing/cv9cuvx)

[3]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3lucwl/21co_websit...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3lucwl/21co_website_has_just_been_updated_introducing/cv9djoo)

[4]
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014RD021C](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014RD021C)

[5] [https://21.co/faq/#making-a-profit](https://21.co/faq/#making-a-profit)

[6] [https://21.co/faq/#technical-
specifications](https://21.co/faq/#technical-specifications)

[7]
[https://alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator](https://alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator)

~~~
Phlarp
"Can you make a profit with the 21 Bitcoin Computer after accounting for
energy costs? Yes, you can indeed make a profit with the 21 Bitcoin Computer.
However, you would do so not by directly selling bitcoin, but by selling
digital goods for bitcoin."

These guys deserve an award for sleaziest PR spin.

~~~
mthoms
"Can I get my money back for the 21 Bitcoin Computer after realizing what a
mistake I've made? Yes, you can indeed get your money back with the 21 Bitcoin
Computer. However, you would do so not by directly returning the machine, but
by selling digital goods for bitcoin."

------
trg2
This is fascinating. It doesn't look like it's designed for bitcoin miners. It
looks like it's the start of a future where computing power is traded for
digital goods and services.

------
tlrobinson
In case you haven't been following 21 Inc (formerly 21e6), this company has
raised at least $121.1M:
[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/21e6](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/21e6)

------
undefined0
> The 21 Bitcoin Chip means your 21 Bitcoin Computer has access to a
> constantly replenished source of bitcoin.

> This means you can now write programs that connect to the Bitcoin network
> just as easily as they connect to the Internet.

It sounds like the mining is intended to create a constant supply of bitcoins
so you don't have to "top up" your wallet. Then the bitcoins are used to
process things (putting information in the blockchain) and you're also selling
access to run sandboxed code on your machine - presumably code which interacts
with the blockchain.

They've phrased this terribly by saying you're selling "digital goods and
services", overly broad and meaningless words.

------
airza
Question for the bitcoin enthusiasts out there - if stolen computing time is a
reasonable component of the current hash power, why would market rate for
mined coins ever be above the cost of electricity?

~~~
placeybordeaux
These days the extreme majority of hashing power comes from ASICs not from
botnets.

~~~
Phlarp
A few edge cases to consider here:

1) ASIC hardware running on free, stolen or "creatively accounted"
electricity. Maybe it's as mundane as a janitor with a bunch of hardware
stashed in a closet, or an office complex that charges a flat rate for
utilities. Maybe it's as exotic as a mining farm getting a cut rate on nearby
power generation in a cold climate.

1) ASIC hardware, by it's very nature, requires some type of network
connectivity-- either with other miners, a special dispatching machine or
directly to the bitcoin network over TCP, one way or another it needs to know
what the blockchain looks like at any given point in time. This means attack
surface area. All it takes is one widely deployed bug and those machines you
run are mining into someone else's account.

Both of these scenarios, along with countless others, make mining in any
capacity a negative sum game.

~~~
brighton36
It's clearly not a negative sum game as evidenced by the 6 years that miners
have been mining. It's typically a very low-profit, high-stress business - but
you can't argue with the numbers.

------
cschep
The scrolljacking on [https://www.21.co/](https://www.21.co/) is so bad. Just
let me scroll through your nice looking site!

------
sigma2015
There is no chance in the world that you are even going to mine even a single
block with this set up in a thousand years.

As a matter of fact even with a GPU rack it will take a hundred years or so
given what you are up against by now.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXerV3f5jN8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXerV3f5jN8)

------
minerb50
The whole rant around 21's "bitcoin computer", reminds me of this:
[https://youtu.be/ojtMtIyD6dM?t=40](https://youtu.be/ojtMtIyD6dM?t=40) \- the
product barely went on pre-sale and look how much buzz (albeit negative) it
already generated.

------
comrh
Is that big thing on a top a heatsink?

~~~
TimWolla
According to the photos on Amazon it's a case. But there is a heatsink and a
fan underneath: [http://ecx.images-
amazon.com/images/I/91aUgUqFTIL._SL1500_.j...](http://ecx.images-
amazon.com/images/I/91aUgUqFTIL._SL1500_.jpg)

------
Mahn
What a strange product. For the life of me I can't figure out who is this for.

------
spullara
Does anyone have an approximate btc/kwh (and thus $) this generates? Why don't
I just convert money into btc much more efficiently and store it in my wallet?

------
williamcotton
The three most difficult questions with blockchain technology are "where is
the blockchain data?", "where are the keys that represent my wallet?" and "how
do I get my initial bitcoin?"

This product very succinctly answers both questions in a reliable way.

It looks like they've got some basic ability to write to the blockchain, and
since this only costs a few thousand satoshis, the very small amounts of
Bitcoin that this device mine will be useful.

It looks like they're hoping that further profits can be driven back to the
address that wrote to the blockchain.

This is a really good idea but fully dependent on how hackable this is.

Like, do I get the full Bitcoin JSON-RPC interface?

This would let me use this device as a pretty reliable source of
identification, using Bitcoin's public key infrastructure to sign and
authenticate messages.

It would also let me write client software on behalf of the physical device
that could read and write arbitrary messages to the Bitcoin blockchain,
allowing for custom colored coins, but with keychain ownership contained only
within the physical device, instead of on an external server or running on a
laptop.

Do I have direct programmable access to the SHA-256 ASIC?

This would help with content-addressable distributions systems like IPFS.

It would be great if the device could expose an interface that was compatible
with both Common Wallet and Common Blockchain.

Common Blockchain[1] is a protocol that aims to make an abstraction of queries
against the blockchain, allowing devices like the 21 Bitcoin Computer, the
Bitcoin Core software, and web services like Blockcypher to expose a single
interface to client software and Blockchain meta-protocols like Open Assets,
Blockcast [2] and Open Publish [3].

Likewise, Common Wallet is a protocol that aims to make an abstraction for
wallets and key signing devices like the 21 Bitcoin Computer, Trezor,
Mycellium, or Bitcoin Core, so all of these devices can sign custom
transactions that were built by external libraries like Open Publish and to
sign authentication messages for services like Bitstore [5].

There is a very big problem with interoperability between various Bitcoin
wallets, protocols, and services, and there is really no reason for this to be
the case if everyone were to expose the proper interfaces, which roughly model
the Bitcoin JSON-RPC.

[1] [https://github.com/blockai/abstract-common-
blockchain](https://github.com/blockai/abstract-common-blockchain)

[2]
[https://github.com/blockai/blockcast](https://github.com/blockai/blockcast)

[3]
[https://github.com/blockai/openpublish](https://github.com/blockai/openpublish)

[4] [https://github.com/blockai/abstract-common-
wallet](https://github.com/blockai/abstract-common-wallet)

[5] [https://github.com/blockai/bitstore-
client](https://github.com/blockai/bitstore-client)

------
a-dub
I suspect that this company will probably go down in history, but probably not
for the reasons they think...

------
idiotclock
Is the 'native' cli free?

~~~
idiotclock
Well it's 400 dollars,* I figure "the suite of pre-configured Bitcoin-
dependent software" is what hikes up the price.

1
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014RD021C?camp=1789&creati...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014RD021C?camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B014RD021C&linkCode=as2&linkId=K36ZRXOEXVD5LYXL&redirect=true&ref_=as_li_tl&tag=21inccorsit-20)

~~~
mwilcox
The low expected production run for a custom handware development kit would be
what drives the price up.

