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Bitcoin Arrives At NYSE, Startup Aims To Tackle Micropayments and Easy Mining
itwbennett writes: A startup company whose backers include Qualcomm, Cisco Systems and a former ARM executive, and which reportedly has raised "well north of $116 million" has just come out of stealth mode. The first thing to know about the company, which calls itself 21, is that it has designed an embedded chip for bitcoin mining. The details aren't entirely clear, but the plan seems to be to get its bitcoin mining chip embedded into millions of smartphones and tablets, and for those devices to work collectively to mine new currency. But the company has larger ambitions: It sees its chip as a way to solve the problem of micro payments and it could also be used to pay for the chips themselves.
This was followed by news that the New York Stock Exchange will begin tracking and showing Bitcoin's dollar value. Reader Lashdots adds a link to an article describing how Silicon Valley finally joined the rush to invest in Bitcoin-related businesses.
Now I'll own all of Boardwalk!!!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Ever thought about buying a Russian-made car? No? Me neither! How about a Russian-mobe? No? Me neither!
Bitcoin mining is ridiculously energy-inefficient and putting a mining chip in each smartphone is a great way to make your battery last 10 minutes.
Chips in phones wasting battery life to mine scam currency.
Wouldn't constant bitcoin mining pretty much destroy battery life on any phone or tablet?
Or is the advantage that I can use electricity from my office or Starbucks instead of electricity that I actually have to pay for?
Dogecoin
And all the devices they manage to scam people into buying with this put together probably won't have a hash rate as good as a single ASIC.
If you are serious about using bitcoins for transaction purposes, it seems pretty clear that there is a role for something more secure than 'wallets' running on people's shoddily-secured systems(or, god help us, 'cloud wallet' bullshit); by design, there isn't anyone in the ecosystem to soak up the fraud as a cost of doing business(which is what allows, say, absurdly pitiful CC security to survive), and the usual efficiencies associated with networked computers make stealing the things a great deal more efficient than stealing cash one wallet at a time.
If that is the idea; then sure, a 'bitcoin chip', is probably not the worst way to handle the problem(now, why any OEM would pay extra for the chip, the packaging, and the board space, rather than, say, just re-using the 'trustzone' stuff that basically all ARM cores have, or coaxing the 'secure element' that they are embedding to support some other contactless payment scheme into handling bitcoin related data, that's a much harder problem to answer). Assuming you don't fuck it up, it'll allow you to have a 'wallet' for bitcoins that isn't a total security disaster, is actually vaguely convenient in real life, and so on.
If the idea actually involves any 'mining' (beyond whatever bare-minimum might be needed for a wallet to initiate a transfer), though, this idea could scarcely be dumber. Bitcoin ICs are power hungry, achieve essentially zero gains from decentralization(modest resistance to datacenter fires, I suppose; but substantial additional bandwidth and control-node costs, plus the inability to concentrate them where electricity is cheap); and have so far become obsolete at a rate even faster than that of most cellphone components. Many of them don't even make it to customers before they burn more energy than they 'produce' in bitcoins; and the ones eating battery power, and baked into a cellphone for its entire life, sure as hell aren't going to do better.
At least the ones you keep at home are as efficient as electrical space heaters at converting electricity to heat, with some free math thrown in. In mobile devices, that isn't a virtue.
So what's the plan? Conceptually adequate, but probably doomed, smartcard-esque IC designed to implement a secure wallet; or utterly bullshit and completely crack-addled plan to distribute compute load to the worst possible places?
Is good, gets three hectares to the deciliter!
Wow, you mean I can use my phone to bitmine? Will it pay for the extra battery I'll need to bring when my phone dies? No? Will it lead to increased heat on my phone which kills the battery, even beyond the power draw? Yes? Why would I want this on a phone?
I'm sure they'll claim to be great for the first 50k that are delivered, but not so sure that will be true when the delivery date slips + months, as has happened with every other miner. Pyrawhat now?
Let's connect the dots.
Recently a study says standby appliances cost billion of dollars.
The energy companies then study alternative ways to waste energy, since possible regulation may come soon.
At one board meeting, the CEO asks "So how can we squander more energy?" and a young guy hesitantly raises hand and says "There is that thing called bitcoin mining, people waste electricity to solve cryptograph..."
"OK, let's force consumers to mint whatevercoin NOW"
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Jobs available backed by 121 million in VC funding- https://21.co/#jobs
Companies investing 121 million in 21INC - https://www.crunchbase.com/org...
More details - http://www.coindesk.com/21-int...
better article - https://medium.com/@21dotco/a-...
Reason Why Qualcomm may be so interested - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If the chip was efficient enough to actually cover it's own cost, shouldn't 21 just build it's own cluster and print it's own money? Oh, it's not? Maybe we can get someone to pay for all of the electricity this thing uses and just throw them a few pennies every once in a while to keep them happy ......
Bitcoin might not be viable as a currency, but it is not a Ponzi scheme. Stop perpetuating this lie.
First and foremost it is looking like 21 has developed extremely inexpensive and efficient chips to embed in smart devices which will have a very nominal power usage and only mine a few satoshi's per hour for the sake of profiting off of IoT services and not primarily off the value of the mined bitcoins themselves.
Reasons -
1) Allowing for micropayments for services, sites and products where the user doesn't even need to signup for a service or provide a credit card.
2) More secure authentication which depends upon the security of the very secure blockchain instead of any built in software. This will be completely transparent to the user as they just need to use 1 satoshi and than they can have the ability to use trustless escrow or smart contracts on the blockchain.The intention here is to make bitcoin useful without the user even knowing about it or having to purchase any.
3) Free SAAS services which depend upon the bitcoins being mined.
4) The ability to pay for and resell bandwidth, where routers and cell phones may become part of a decentralized Small Cell network - https://www.youtube.com/watch?... This is likely why Qualcomm is invested.
5) Reducing the costs of devices by subsiding a bit of the upfront costs with SaaS, mining reward, and BTC tx fees all possible with adding a mining chip.
One good consequence will be in the reversal of the trend of the centralization of mining and the further strengthening of bitcoin. I expect other companies like google, MSFT, AMD, IBM, ect... to form partnerships and start to develop their own competing chips which may use bitcoin or another alt.
just plain old snake oil
...what's in it for me? The answer is NOTHING. What's in it for the ATTs, Verizons, Sprints of the world is the question. If the players don't see an opportunity, this thing is dead in the water.
To start mining bitcoins for our Wall Street overlords
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
I'm going to use my Bitcoin to buy another battery for my phone, lately it seems to run down quickly.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
What an utter waste. Bitcoin represents trust, not economic activity. Yes, trust is nice and all, but it doesn't matter. Economic activity matters. Period. No economic activity as the basis for your currency? Then that trust is worth nothing. End of story.
Let me introduce you to the next fiscal disaster. For sure, it's in slow-mo right now, but just you wait. For the love of your standard of living, do not buy into Bitcoin.
Lets say that the random numbers this bitcoin chip uses to generate hashes is designed to be breakable, or just bad.
What effect could that have?
What the fuck are they mining?
How the fuck does that crap have value? What kind of moron says "SURE, I'll accept your unique garbage data in lieu of cash!" And how are there so many morons all saying that, that it became its own economy. Can it even be cashed out? Are there some demented philanthropists out there, with serious fetishes for data, doling it out?
Look at me, I've conceptualized this new intangible world called... Barnia! And in it, I've scattered masses of richest! In order to go there and find any, you must stick your pinkie into your urethra and wiggle it around until you find some! If you feel the need to build a hands-free machine that can probe your urethra for you, that's a-okay. When you want to cash out, just bring me all that sweet sweet urea cheese and I'll have your cash money ready for you pronto.
I mean what the fuck.
I can see Microsoft calling their buddy Intel and saying "Wanna make this required for Windows 11 and we split the profits?" PS, you get the foot the electric bill =)
I'm sure the rest will follow with phone versions... I don't see these being used to sell you a "free" or "reduced cost" device just pure cash for them with a microscopic subtext in a license/EULA/ToS somewhere.
Last time I checked ( a year ago? ), the full bitcoin block chain was north of 9GB, and so is surely at least 10 GB now. What embedded device has that kind of memory to jack around with bitcoin mining? Even then it is like playing a small lottery: most people will never mine anything and those that do get a whopping 25 bitcoins, which will drop to 12.5 and then to zero before long.
Are all the coins mined with the consumer's electricity going into the startup's wallet? ...or does this mean everyone who buys a mobile with one of these chips has to set up their own wallet (good luck with that)?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As far as I've read, producing coins is the carrot on the stick to develop a worldwide blockchain processing network. As that finite chest of coins dwindles down, perhaps this is the next step toward a much more broadly distributed network.
I wouldn't expect these chips to be burning thru my portable device's battery and making some corporation miniscule trickles of coin. The processing supports the network and makes your device a participant, which could enable some really interesting new economies.
The "free" SAAS services are not free. You're just paying for them in your utility bill instead of directly. There's no subsidy here, just a different billing method.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Honestly, I would rather make micro-payments with Bitcoin than with a CC.
The advantage is that if my BitCoin payment is intercepted, it cannot be used to do anything nefarious (in fact this payment will be broadcast, so worrying about interception is foolhardy already), a CC transaction can be intercepted and the CC number used for all sorts of things.
This is the advantage to authenticating an action rather than an actor.
Bitcoins and Wall Street. There's been enough stories about scams and losses with Bitcoin - disappearing exchanges, vaporized money. Now we're going to pair amateur scammers with professional dirtbags. No fucking thanks. (Flame all you want, but I'll save them to remind you later when I turn out to be right.)
Obligatory nitpick.
Bitcoins and Wall Street.
That's four words.
This is the stupidest idea I've ever heard. It takes about 1000W to run a decent mining rig with an array of ASIC embedded chips. Putting one in a phone will get you about $0.50 a year and drain your battery in an hour.
Why not tie a crypto currency to something productive like protein folding, DNA sequencing, SETI, Electric Sheep, or any number of other useful computing projects? Then it would at least have some real value to it, not just pointless waste of energy.