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
> It is designed for developers to easily build Bitcoin-payable apps, services and devices