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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Mining bitcoin for fiat is not its purpose.

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".

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

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