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Bitcoin Arrives At NYSE, Startup Aims To Tackle Micropayments and Easy Mining

Posted by Soulskill on from the go-big-or-go-home dept.

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.

2 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. Why ??? by codebonobo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  2. Bitcoin endgame? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.