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Sambdala

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

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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

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