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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.
So what's the plan?
Raise "well north of $116 million" in VC money for a pointless product, live high on the hog for a few years, deliver pointless product, act shocked when nobody buys it. Repeat as desired.
They're going to love a new currency. Look at how much they can manipulate a regulated currency to fuck over people and enrich themselves. Image what they can do with an unregulated one.
Correct, except Bitcoins primary use will become their vehicle to launder their profits which are stolen from other markets. Many of their useful techniques to steal money such as quantitative easing, inflation, bail ins and bail outs, do not work within bitcoin.
If it's possible to offer some compelling new service for 1-2 dollars per month, why not just charge that directly, instead of the Rube Goldberg method?
Excellent question. One of bitcoins main problems is its lack of user friendliness or its odd and complicated nature. What 21 Inc is trying to do is mainstream the use of bitcoin by treating it more as a protocol instead of currency. No longer will users have to learn about bitcoin, buy some, learn how to secure it, find all the services and apps that allow them take advantage of bitcoin individually. With a BTC enabled device it will just allow them to use these features built in without them having to acquire bitcoin or even know it exists. Widespread adoption and the decentralization of mining will benefit both 21 Inc and the users at the same time. If 21 Inc just created and app with preloaded bitcoins than they would have a more difficult job of getting unique new users and would not be strengthening the ecosystem by further increasing the hashrate and decentralizing it.