>The 21 Bitcoin Computer consumes 15W (5V @3A) and has an efficiency of approximately 0.16 Joules per Gigahash and arrives configured to calculate at a rate of approximately 50 Gigahashes per second.
So taking the computer's price of $400 and using this calculator [1] w/ the current difficulty level, 50 Gigahashes/s, 15W consumption, 5% pool commission, $0.15 $/kW energy costs, and the current exchange rate of $332USD/BTC we get:
$0.07 in daily revenue or
5714 days (15.6 years) to breakeven assuming constant difficulty and current exchange rate levels.
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> Please note: the satoshis you mine provide a source of readily-available bitcoin for application development, but are not intended to be used for investment purposes.
I wonder if they included this disclaimer because the 21 Bitcoin computer will never generate a profit, or because of some other legal barrier? Either way, they should stick "NOT AN EFFICIENT MINING DEVICE, SOLELY FOR DEVELOPMENT PURPOSES" at the top of their description instead of dancing around the issue, making it seem like they're hoping to lure naive miners into purchasing the device.
The new "buffered mining" and predictive mining features they announced take more of the risk out of mining. Not only do they have a pool to ameliorate the variance of finding a block, but they remove the risk of the difficulty varying, and even give you advance payments on mining before you've done it.
By taking out all the risk, variance, and profit, 21 is step-by-step approaching a design where customers just buy bitcoin with money. Except they feel like they are mining, with a very wasteful, expensive, inefficient chip.
Buying bitcoin was the right design all along. Eventually, 21 might discover this, if they can get over all the sunk costs they've invested in making mining chips without a market.
Meta: Finally, a comment that isn't hung up on the scrolling behaviour, or the price of the mining power. It's notable the rsync.net has similar, terrible web behaviour, but we seem to have sane discussions about it's service.
On topic: I think the neat part of 21 is that it seems to be a step forward in realising microtransactions, in a decentralised manner. Right now the only way around microtransactions is having a centralised pool, where you e.g. put $5/month in, and it pays services out of that pool. The problem with paying services directly is the base fees associated with transactions (for CC, it's around $0.15 + 3%, through Stripe).
How is this realizing microtransactions in a decentralized manner?
Having to pay a few cents in transaction fees to get a transaction included on the Bitcoin blockchain does not seem like a great platform for true microtransactions(say <$1).
21 offers their own microtransaction service, but that's just a centralized shared wallet/ledger that offers nothing new. There are multiple centralized services where you can send someone else bitcoin.
The only thing that has potential is payment channels, but I'm not sure how they are going to be implemented in a way that bypasses the Bitcoin blockchain's miner fee.
They aren't selling this as a self-financing investment so the ROI from BTC alone is not entirely relevant. The value prop is to get access to bitcoins and the network for development purposes, if I'm not mistaken.
The better question might be is this a problem people are willing to spend $400 to solve?
Couldn't they have just used software to emulate the steady stream of Bitcoin that this thing produces? The inclusion of the miner and it's subsequent price tag (over what a normal Pi costs) makes it seem ridiculous.
If their endgame is to create a mining chip that can be realistically put into devices, they'd better figure out a much better form factor for it as well.
I don't think the mined bitcoin is meant to be thought of as a revenue source at all.
I think the intention of the 21Inc machine is to have a computer that is automatically connected to the blockchain and can transact with others programmatically.
I think the mined satoshis should be thought of a stream of digital ink -- ensuring your device always has enough ink to at least write into the ledger (blockchain).
If successful, and 21Inc units become an inherent part of IoT, I think we would see a lot of satoshi level transactions that aren't meant to be quantified in USDs; the transaction will just be meant to show proof of interaction between two machines.
Ex. your vehicle passed X checkpoint at Y time - use a satoshi to write it into the ledger.
I Googled cloud mining and found https://www.genesis-mining.com/pricing this page where I can buy 50 GH/s in the cloud for $22.49. Why would I want this local for 18 times the price?
I fail to see why embedding bitcoin inside hardware is a smart idea, especially given that most of the world are moving towards mobile devices where battery life and storage are super important.
I can see this would make payments more decentralized, but how much do regular users or developers care about decentralized systems? Most of the world depends on highly centralized systems, including the decentralized protocols such as email or the Internet itself.
They should remove bullshit claims like "provides you with a constant stream of Bitcoins". People might actually think that this is a miner, which it really isn't. It is the equivalent of digging for gold with a rusty spoon. You could spend 10 times less on an exchange and that would provide you with a bigger "stream of Bitcoins" than what this thing could make in a year.
Because Bitcoin isn't money. It's a contract and notary system. A single satoshi can be used to publicly and programmatically set, satisfy, and extend a private contract in whole or part. The potential applications of this technology are mind blowing. Smart contracts are Bitcoin's killer app. Most people just don't know it yet.
The way 21 is positioned on this page is (I'd say poor) marketing meant to sell these devices to developers who aren't yet sold on the next thing in Bitcoin (i.e. smart contracts). The story told on this page and the roadmap they're showing investors is completely different. Just wait.
What is the point of this? If they want to get merchants started, offer a "starter kit" download. If they want to offer a miner, this thing would take 15.6 years minimum to pay for itself.
So, yeah, this product is a bit confusing until you realize it's just meant to be for application development. The whole idea is to build services that people will pay you for, that are served off of your personal 21.co machine, that or to purchase the services that are being offered. The mining bit is just meant to give you a small stream of bitcoin to mess around with.
This could all be done with your own server or whatever, the 21.co machine just makes setup easier.
None of my BTC friends understand who this product is for.
You can develop for Bitcoin either by a) using chain.com or blockchain.info or b) by installing Bitcoin on your computer and waiting for the blockchain to sync.
I like how the price and CPU power, the two most important aspects of a Bitcoin miner, are not listed anywhere on the page, forcing a click to the Amazon page where customers are likely to be disappointed.
The promo page explicitly states that the device provides "a constantly replenished source of Bitcoin." Looking at the clock speed on Amazon shows that the device is barely powerful enough to generate enough Bitcoin to offset the energy cost.
The Amazon page clearly calls out the amount of bitcoin generated as "small" and "for development purposes".
The 21 Bitcoin Computer is the first computer with native hardware and software support for the Bitcoin protocol. That means the hardware to mine a stream of small amounts of bitcoin for development purposes, and the software to make that bitcoin useful for buying and selling digital goods.
Developers use the 21 Bitcoin Computer to quickly add Bitcoin-based monetization to any app, service, or device. Please note: the satoshis you mine provide a source of readily-available bitcoin for application development, but are not intended to be used for investment purposes.
A legitimate use case. This isn't intended as a serious miner (they're calling out satoshis, which is the smallest divisible unit of a coin, a hundredth of a millionth, with a USD value of a 3 millionths of a penny) and isn't sold as one.
They could probably preload it with more bitcoins than this device is likely to mine in its lifetime for the same cost.
It stumps me why they'd include the miner at all, but they may be trying to pivot from the miner as their main product. My impression from their press releases was that they were aiming more at crazy IoT things like embedding miners into household objects.
meh, if I wanted to run a full bitcoin node (for example, so I don't have to rely on Coinbase or spv wallets) with minimal hassle(sp?) on a new computer, it would save me some time / effort and presumably run in the background with minimal annoyance - my view is that it's aimed at the experienced and frequent user of bitcoin rather than those who think of "blockchain" and "bitcoin" as a marketing buzzword
I'll dissent here: I like it. It's different from the default behavior and took a moment to get used to, but I much prefer this to the parallax-esque behavior I see more commonly. This mimics a swipe very well. Though worth noting that I scroll with two fingers on a touch pad, so it turns into very much a physical swipe.
The UX is definitely different, but it works for me.
I like it too, when it works. It's a nice clean swipe thing. But it goes in the opposite direction for me about 30% of the time. (Using two-finger scroll on a Macbook Pro trackpad.)
What infuriated you about it? It isn't a smooth scroll, sure, but it suits the content. I get much more annoyed by sites that try maintain smooth scrolling while still presenting "slides" of information. Then you spend 80% of the time scrolling through useless transitions. This site felt pretty easy to consume.
I have a tendency to scroll while I am reading. This made it so the first section, which I had not yet finished reading scrolled out of view. I scrolled back up and had to re-look for my place and instinctively scrolled down again losing my place again. Took strong will to give up scrolling and read each slide completely before moving on.
Deviates significantly from a normal user experience and results in a jarring experience for me personally.
It made me leave the website almost immediately, despite being somewhat interested. It's not usable for me on a totally standard MacBook Air, because as soon as I even touch the trackpad, the website decides to scroll up a whole page, when of course I wanted to scroll down.
I'm not interested in fighting with ridiculous scrolling games. If they don't care about testing their ridiculous scrolling plugins, I don't care about their product.
Sometimes I reach out to companies on Twitter or email telling them to please disable their weird scrolling effects. Nobody seems to care. I conclude that this behavior signifies a company that doesn't care about user experience.
By now I'm a little curious about these things, so I did a simple test of starting at the top and trying to scroll down to read the rest of the page. I can't find any way to consistently scroll to the third page. Just touching the touchpad on the second page causes an upwards scroll, even when I'm very obviously trying to scroll down.
Sounds like a lot of the complaints are from trackpad users. I guess the site developers were too lazy to test on more devices than their dev stations.
It takes control away from the user and breaks the default scroll behaviour. It's frustrating and annoying and I instantly feel at odds with any company that uses it. Also has the tendency to glitch out on trackpads and go past where I want it to.
Regarding the product. I don't see why developers need to develop using actual bitcoins so I don't buy that spiel. There's alternative testing blockchains for a reason.
It seems to me like they are simply trying to become one of the dominant mining pool players. I don't see how they increase mining pool decentralization. All other mining devices are not tied to one mining pool. Their's is.
So taking the computer's price of $400 and using this calculator [1] w/ the current difficulty level, 50 Gigahashes/s, 15W consumption, 5% pool commission, $0.15 $/kW energy costs, and the current exchange rate of $332USD/BTC we get:
$0.07 in daily revenue or
5714 days (15.6 years) to breakeven assuming constant difficulty and current exchange rate levels.
---
> Please note: the satoshis you mine provide a source of readily-available bitcoin for application development, but are not intended to be used for investment purposes.
I wonder if they included this disclaimer because the 21 Bitcoin computer will never generate a profit, or because of some other legal barrier? Either way, they should stick "NOT AN EFFICIENT MINING DEVICE, SOLELY FOR DEVELOPMENT PURPOSES" at the top of their description instead of dancing around the issue, making it seem like they're hoping to lure naive miners into purchasing the device.
[1] http://www.alcula.com/calculators/finance/bitcoin-mining/