The 21 Bitcoin Computer | Hacker News Reader

The 21 Bitcoin Computer

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129 pointspaulbaumgart84 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

"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

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

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.)

Perhaps the real value will be in the software. But I would expect that software to be open anyway.

There's nothing I see that can be done by this "Bitcoin Computer" that couldn't be done by a raspi + a few hundred thousand satoshis bought from an exchange for a dollar or two. But this solution has more buzzwords.

Is this the result of "Valley Economics" optimizing for investment, not revenue?

Its plug and play. So that is something that is very badly needed for a majority of people who might want to use BtC.

I believe they are using their mining power, plus what is added from this pool of devices to include the fee-less microtransactions created from these devices in their blocks.

In other words, this is intended to be a solution to the microtransaction problem.

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

Me too. 21*220$=4620$, which is quite a bit for a PC- it would have been a good article, especially if he bought everything with bitcoin.

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*

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.

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.

You’d generally write that with a hyphen: “The 21-Bitcoin Computer”.

I think they're being a little too clever with the name.
https://bitcoin.org/en/faq#wont-the-finite-amount-of-bitcoin...

> 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?

Even their official FAQ states that you won't be able to mine at a profit with their product:
"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. 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." [https://www.21.co/faq/]

So, "yes, you can make a profit, but only if it has nothing to do with the 21 Bitcoin Computer".

Yes, you can make a profit - if you agree to kill someone with the 21 Bitcoin Computer as the murder weapon.

This sounds like an opening for some sort of noir-absurdist series with some of the flavor of 100 Bullets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Bullets

God, how is that marketing? Honestly, how is that just seen as 'marketing'? How did they justify even writing that sentence with a clear conscience?
This is just infuriating. This is just taking advantage of stupid/impatient people who will order to get rich quick, and not read anything about what they're doing. It's taking advantage of people, knowing full well they don't understand what you're marketing to them.
Seriously, think about the uproar if this were medicine; buy this pill to cure your cancer.*
*Pill doesn't actually cure cancer, but somewhere a doctor is able to help you with that.

Terrible, misleading, ineffective marketing is still marketing.

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

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.

> "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

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.)

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.

the FAQ says "as an efficiency of approximately 0.16 Joules per Gigahash and can calculate 50-125 Gigahashes per second."
this mining calculator https://alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator does claim $0.19/day at today's exchange rate and difficulty.

So it seems the idea is you spend $400 to get a Bitcoin machine and then you have 25 cents to spend each day on news articles, apps or music in some effortless or 'identityless' way.

My theory is that their real motivation is to ensure that there continues to be a robust mining ecosystem when the block reward falls off to the point that nobody wants to mine anymore without high transaction fees. So they proliferate a bunch of low cost mining gadgets that people will use primarily for the convenience it offers in making micropayments and in verifying identity, while they also do mining to ensure the health of the network but not actually make any significant money for the owner.
This would be the first iteration of their first gadget, which isn't cheap yet but could be if volumes are high enough, and future iterations would be cheaper and better.
The identity feature is my speculation based on tweets by the CEO about the need for better identity solutions and the enormous market for solving identity fraud problems. Not sure how a gadget like this addresses that but I think it is part of their plan.

How much power does it consume to generate that quarter per day?

If you figure 0.16 Joules / gigahash and 100 gigahash/second, you'd be looking at about 0.39 kwh / day. At $0.10/kwh, you'd be spending about $0.04/day on power.

What's the hash rate of the 21 Co computer? I thought it would be included on the promo page but did not see it.

"50-125 Gigahashes per second." No idea why it's such a wide range, but that's what they claim:
https://21.co/faq/#technical-specifications

Mining bitcoin for fiat is not its purpose.

Why is "USD worth of Bitcoin" not a reasonable approximation for the value you get from the bitcoins it generates?

The alternative is to just buy Bitcoin with fiat instead of running random hardware from a startup for days to get any meaningful value.

I believe it's called "money."
As in, "I wish to exchange my fantasy internet points for money."

> I believe
That's why it is called "fiat"

That's a snappy one-liner, but "a currency which has value because people believe in it" applies just as well to Bitcoin as it does to the US dollar.

It also doesn't make any damn sense, given that "fiat" is Latin for "let it be done", not "I believe".

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That's the only interesting application of their low-power mining tech so far in my opinion - having the ability to offer innovative pricing schemes or heavily subsidize nearly any electronic good.

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...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3lucwl/21co_websit...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3lucwl/21co_websit...
[4] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014RD021C
[5] https://21.co/faq/#making-a-profit
[6] https://21.co/faq/#technical-specifications
[7] https://alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator

"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.

"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."

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.

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

> 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.

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?

I don't think the question is well-posed. Why would the market rate for electricity affect the price at all if stolen computing time were a reasonable component of the current hash power?
If bitcoin mining were competing for the market for stolen computing time, then the "pwner" of each zombie would make an economic decision as to whether to use the machine for other tasks (spamming, password cracking, etc.) based on the relative value of those tasks in bitcoin vs. the amount of bitcoin produced by the machine. As the price/hashrate ratio increases, more zombies would switch to mining; as it decreased, the flow would go in the other direction. The price of electricity is irrelevant to the "pwner" of the machine as regards this decision; for them electricity is free.
In terms of how this were to affect price, that's a more complex relationship, even in theory. As the difficulty increases, it gets more expensive to attack the network (and thus artificially expand supply), so the price will presumably face upward pressure to keep the relationship of difficulty to inverse price constant (assuming price/hashrate as the function is disingenuous, but is probably reasonable for local price and difficulty changes).
That said, it is unlikely that the antecedent holds -- it is extremely doubtful that stolen computing time (or even total CPU + GPU mining) is a reasonable component of the current hash power.

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

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.

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.

Whats the standard world wide cost of electricity? It varies by well over 10:1. Also it varies over time. Its an arbitrage market for electricity, kind of. This is assuming a perfect efficient market, LOL.
Note that if you mine your own coins its very hard to track where they came from, what with there being no paper trail of you purchasing them from anyone. If you buy coins from someone then that someone can be strong armed by a .gov or .com into telling them who they sold coins to, assuming they don't have a direct data feed right to the DEA or whatever. So in the stereotypical bleating tabloid form of "buy weed online with BTC" if "they" have a list of BTC buyers as 0.001% of the population and give it to customs as a filter on packages coming in from Amsterdam... On the other hand if you're not on a list of BTC buyers because you mined your own... Of course WRT paranoia, being on a list of known custom ASIC owners is about as bad as being on a list of weed grow light purchasers, so I'm not sure this product fixes anything.

It wouldn't. Stolen computing time is a negligible component of the current hash power.

Because the cost of electricity required to mine competitively is variable. When the price of bitcoins goes up, mining becomes more profitable. More hashpower is added by new and existing miners until it no longer makes financial sense to do so. The value of a bitcoin is almost always near the cost of mining one, but it's the value that determines how much mining there is.

tldr: It's a market. If demand that day is greater than the supply, then you'll make money. The cost of bitcoin is dependent on the demand, not the cost of production. If/as demand goes down, the cost of production will go down commensurately. There's always a fixed supply of coins entering the market every day. It does not matter how many people are mining, or at what price those people are mining.
Also, it's 'stolen'/'subsidized' energy that is being leveraged. Not computing time.

Well if demand is high enough, they'll run out of cheap illicit bitcoins and start getting into the more expensive legitimate supply eventually.

What are you talking about? Where are these cheap illicit bitcoins for sale?

Why wouldn't they be sold in a normal marketplace? It's not readily apparent that they're any different from normal ones.

The scrolljacking on https://www.21.co/ is so bad. Just let me scroll through your nice looking site!

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

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

Is that big thing on a top a heatsink?

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...

Yes.

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

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?

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
[2] https://github.com/blockai/blockcast
[3] https://github.com/blockai/openpublish
[4] https://github.com/blockai/abstract-common-wallet
[5] https://github.com/blockai/bitstore-client

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

Is the 'native' cli free?

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...

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

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