
21 Makes Bitcoin Useful to Developers - desantis
https://21.co/features/
======
minimaxir
21 may make Bitcoin useful to developers, but it will _never_ be useful to
anyone in charge of the development budget at atleast $0.01/query for trivial
queries: [https://21.co/mkt/](https://21.co/mkt/)

Any business which intends to last longer than a hackathon would get a greater
long-term advantage by developing such queries in-house. And most of those
example APIs are available for _free_ from IBM Watson/AlchemyAPI/Open Source
anyways.

~~~
bduerst
I don't get it - are these just API wrappers with (more expensive) bitcoin
pricing?

~~~
minimaxir
Correct. And it is tauted as a feature since you don't need "credit card,
signup, or API key."

[https://medium.com/@21/buy-50-apis-with-bitcoin-in-
the-21-ma...](https://medium.com/@21/buy-50-apis-with-bitcoin-in-
the-21-marketplace-1fbf5208e397)

~~~
bduerst
Right, but isn't it replacing that functionality with the additional need of
an embedded bitcoin wallet?

The command line example in that article requires a $400 bitcoin device.

~~~
j2kun
I think you missed the one-line terminal command that installs on any linux-
based device. You can get the tools set up in just a few minutes, and for
free, actually.

------
ssharp
The test I use to understand most "but with Bitcoin!" ideas is simple: imagine
the application "but with dollars".

In this case, 21 isn't using Bitcoin is some way that makes it substantially
different than what could already be done. If a person wanted to, they could
create an API marketplace just like this, and charge 1 cent, or fractions of a
cent, per transaction. Rather than turn your computer into a bitcoin mining
botnet node, you load your account with a larger credit card payment to pay
for it. Meanwhile, the marketplace collects the fees and distributes it to the
various API owners' accounts, which can then be withdrawn once the account
reaches some threshold, say $5.

Here, 21 is essentially doing the same thing. Although they discuss being able
to do on-chain or off-chain transactions, putting a tx on the blockchain for
every $0.01 zipcode lookup is completely ridiculous and the success of such an
application would essentially gridlock the blockchain, so accomplishing these
types of micropayments has to be done off-chain. They're ultimately acting as
a middle man between payer and payee, just like most fiat marketplaces are.

21's strategy doesn't seem terrible if you make a lot of assumptions about
what role Bitcoin will play in our future. I personally think they're
substantially off-base and that a world where devices have to constantly mine
Bitcoin and send and receive micropayments to accomplish trivial things seems
like more of a burden than a benefit.

I should also say that you have to think quite a bit about what 21 is doing
and make a lot of additional assumptions on their end in order to even say
their strategy looks good. So far, they've released a very expensive Raspberry
Pi with a hideous miner attached to it and this API marketplace where their
featured API is a $0.01 zipcode lookup. I've been working on a side-project
that requires me to do lookups on zipcode data and it took me all of 10
minutes to download that for free from the internet and drop it into a
database. I get that they're trying to ship, but why no ship with something
people would actually want to use?

------
kordless
I've been talking about hooking cryptocurrencies up to APIs for a few years
now. Today's startup business models are coarse to the point of being stupid.
Worse, mistakes in the model cause user suffering later when pricing has to be
implemented to take the company profitable.

Pay attention to these types of offerings that hook revenue up directly to
code. They are the future of software development and "self hosting" of
applications. I also think they will have far reaching implications on the
more traditional VC startup models.

~~~
doctorcroc
Do you think this business model has to necessarily use bitcoin as the
vehicle?

~~~
kolinko
It's much more difficult - if not impossible - with credit cards. With CCs you
need to trust the receiver to not steal your cc details, and you have a
chargeback risk.

Say you created an API that takes users' data and stores it on S3. Some random
user then comes, pays you $10k to store his data, but a week later does a
chargeback. You're left to pay the costs to AWS.

Finally, with CCs you need to strike deals with payment processors like
Braintree. If you're a private developer it will be impossible. But even as a
company - payment processors are not ready to process payments via command
line. They will ask you where your terms of service are, what's your website,
what's your refund policy and so on.

~~~
krrrh
The corollary is that you consume an API that charges you Bitcoin. You don't
notice right away, but something goes wrong, and API returns bad or null data
for thousands of requests, meanwhile you are still micropaying Bitcoin. You
ask for a refund, but the company running the API doesn't respond to your
emails.

The threat of chargebacks disciplines the market to provide reasonable
customer service.

~~~
kordless
This is why we'll be using ACs to pay for things. Load up an autonomous
corporation with $5, make its job paying for API calls. If something goes
South, it's last job is to pay an alert mechanism that triggers a human
response.

These models turn existing models on their heads, so be aware of other
pitfalls. Productive paranoia is good, but only practice it after you innovate
first.

------
corv
"21 is free software that implements the Payment Required HTTP status code and
much more besides. It makes it easy to (a) send and receive micropayments over
HTTP and to (b) write new kinds of programs that use this basic technology as
an intrinsic primitive, like machine-payable APIs and intelligent agents."

~~~
cyphar
"Free software": I don't see a GitHub repo. And they have non-free terms of
use. The admin should use a better word, like gratis, to describe a
proprietary service.

~~~
TylerE
They're only required to deliver source to anyone they give a binary to.
Having a "github repo" isn't any part of the open source/free software
definition.

------
isuckatcoding
Unless I am misunderstanding how Bitcoin works, doesn't this make the whole
Bitcoin mechanism a bit centralized since every transaction would have to go
through the 21.co servers?

~~~
aminok
Yes (though unlike traditional third party intermediaries, there is no third
party custodian for money you receive, meaning you don't have to trust 21 to
not steal/freeze funds you've received). The innovative component of this that
Bitcoin brings to the table is that the payment system linking the users to
the developers is open/non-proprietary, with no registration walls encumbering
usage.

------
bobwaycott
Let me see if I have this right, using an example we all know:

1\. Build Twitter

2\. Gain critical mass[1]

3\. Place APIs behind Bitcoin transaction[2]

4\. Actually have a revenue model and be (maybe one day) profitable, without
ever having to sell your users to advertisers?

5\. Let others build whatever they like atop your platform without ever being
bothered about it threatening your core business?

What have I missed?

Edit: formatting & footnotes

\---

[1]: or don't wait, and start that way so it's not a surprise to people later

[2]: perhaps swap(2,3)

~~~
hueving
Charging for API usage isn't as profitable as selling your users to
advertisers. Otherwise twitter would already be living just off of selling the
firehose.

~~~
deftnerd
Problem is that when you sell your users to advertisers, it's reducing the
value of your service in the users mind.

I value websites with heavy advertising to be less attractive to me and less
valuable. As more users get turned off, the websites will be able to get less
money from advertisers.

It can become a snowball effect that kills a service.

~~~
bduerst
Most engineers and software developers don't click on ads or use advertising
mediums [1]. Other user segments are less bothered by them.

[https://medium.com/@robleathern/people-in-silicon-valley-
don...](https://medium.com/@robleathern/people-in-silicon-valley-don-t-click-
on-ads-9d2eed1c74af#.ioqcv0e60)

------
bobwaycott
Semi-related question:

What makes this more attractive, friendlier, and/or plausible than building a
service whereby your users—that is, developers—place a CC on file (via Stripe
or whatever), and then just charge them by total monthly API requests in one
bill?

~~~
deftnerd
One benefit of 21's API billing model is lower transaction fees. If the dev
only uses $2 of API fees, using a service like Stripe would eat up 18% of the
income.

Another benefit is that when you do net-30 usage based billing, you always
have to be concerned that the card might be maxed out or invalid by the time
the bill gets charged. With 21, you can be sure that the bill will get paid
since the Bitcoin is locked up in escrow until the transaction is processed.

~~~
lucaspiller
You could always have them pay up front, which is what pretty much all
telephony services like Twilio do, as fraud is high in that market. You could
even have them pay up front with Bitcoin to avoid the CC fees.

------
ianpurton
There's some interesting APIs in the market like a Captcha solver for example.
I could see that getting used. So I guess the blackhat market will get covered
pretty quickly.

------
LandoCalrissian
How, seriously?

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NKCSS
Weird that the code uses 'two1', but the domain is 21.co and they have not
registered two1.co...

~~~
milkey_mouse
Python module names cannot start with a number.

~~~
NKCSS
I know, this is true for more languages; just makes for a bad branding
choice/planning.

------
fiatjaf
How do I get the Bitcoin?

~~~
kolinko
Coinbase.com, Bitmarket.net, Kraken.com to name a few exchanges.

Also, [http://www.reddit.com/r/btc](http://www.reddit.com/r/btc) is a nice
bitcoin community.

~~~
oska
Alternative opinion: /r/btc is full of cranks and conspiracy-theory
credulists.

------
TylerE
Never has a VC been given so much and had so little to show for it.

~~~
marodox
$121 million lol

------
aurelius12
These guys are clearly flailing at this point.

