Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?...
just plain old snake oil
... that can facilitate tasks I cannot accomplish otherwise. Yes, let me have some more.
Bitcoin miners don't rely on generating secret random numbers, they don't even rely on random numbers at all. They just need to put together a block, prepend an arbitrary number to it, and determine if the hash has the required number of zeros in front. If not, change/increment the arbitrary number, repeat.
The worst thing that happens is a million little chips are running the exact same computations redundantly, wasting CPU cycles and becoming a very expensive hot water heater, but nothing more.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
Any mining chip is doomed to failure. Within 6 months it will be worthless, incapable of mining more value than it costs to manufacture and run.
See all the other Bitcoin mining chips that have been released. They look powerful when announced, by the time people get them they are average, and six months later the difficulty level has risen far enough to make them worthless bricks or expensive room heaters. The more of them in existence the faster this will happen. That is how Bitcoin is designed to work.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC