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Comment by zmanian | Hacker News Reader

21 is best understood as an attempt by the VC community to break the Chinese Bitcoin mining monopoly. 21 doesn't appear to be working on Lightning Network like layer 2 technologies that would make the Bitcoin micropayments for server bandwidth viable on the blockchain. In fact as useful financial applications of on chain transactions start to materialize, even P2P payments may start to struggle to be included in blocks.

21 faces one of the most profound information security problem faced by any company. They propose to put their companies capital assets into the homes of consumers and then extract value from those assets in a manner adversarial to the consumers interests. End users/attackers can do everything from blackhole the network traffic of the device to modify the firmware to target the hashing power to a new mining pool. Virtually any weakness in the engineering has the potential to be exploited at vast scale. This should terrify them.

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> They propose to put their companies capital assets into the homes of consumers and then extract value from those assets in a manner adversarial to the consumers interests. End users/attackers can do everything from blackhole the network traffic of the device to modify the firmware to target the hashing power to a new mining pool. Virtually any weakness in the engineering has the potential to be exploited at vast scale. This should terrify them.

Mark my words. If this or similar idea ever takes hold and begins to spread, I am going to start an open source project to hack those devices and redirect their hashing power where consumers want in as easy and streamlined way as possible so that everyone could do it.

I'm tired of companies extracting value from customers in adversarial manner, literally telling their users "fuck you" in their faces.

Hear hear! If you aren't paying for a product, you are the product.

I'd love to see that project play out. Imagine if consumers could click a button to donate to their charity of choice

> Hear hear! If you aren't paying for a product, you are the product.

Worst is that you already paid AND are the product!

This hashing power is useless outside of bitcoin. Even for password cracking.

Well, sure. So let it mine for some charity or for the user instead.

Or not at all, especially when the price of electricity is usually over the price of mined coins.

Here's some irony:

Embedding cryptographic processors in consumer devices to do massively parallel, low-communication work on behalf of a third party was once called "chinese lotto" or "chinese lottery".

See http://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3607.txt and its references..

I would say that 21 is an attempt to extract money from the VC community by pitching Bitcoin as the "next big thing". Given that this announcement doesn't seem to have official Intel press release backing, it's a little shady. I'm also skeptical about them getting to produce a small-run ASIC on Intel's incredibly valuable 22nm FinFET production line.

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