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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.
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?...
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
... that can facilitate tasks I cannot accomplish otherwise. Yes, let me have some more.
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.
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?
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.