Bitcoin Arrives At NYSE, Startup Aims To Tackle Micropayments and Easy Mining 85
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, it's a Monopoly Money printer then? (Score:2, Funny)
Now I'll own all of Boardwalk!!!
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Crap, looks like I landed on Boardwalk :( :( :( *off to jail until I roll double sixes*
*pays fee in bitcoinage*
We don't accept that here
Seriously, the lemming-masters of Wall Street want to help track a not-ready-for-primetime currency? This is great news for all the lemmings and great news for cliff-owners of all nations to rejoice!!1!
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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.
Re:So, it's a Monopoly Money printer then? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Buttcoins lol (Score:1)
Bitcoin mining is ridiculously energy-inefficient and putting a mining chip in each smartphone is a great way to make your battery last 10 minutes.
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Exactly my thought too.
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Chips in phones wasting battery life to mine scam currency.
Or it could just run while it is plugged in charging, I for example plug in my tablet every night to charge have a show on while I try to fall asleep and wake me up in the morning with my alarm it takes it lets say and hour to charge it, and lets say i sleep 8 hours a night that means it could be mining while pugged in not pulling on the battery for 7 hours at a time. I plug in my phone at my desk at my desk four hours at a time and on the shelf at home at night thats a lot hours it could be mineing.
I have
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Chips in phones wasting battery life to mine scam currency.
Or it could just run while it is plugged in charging, I for example plug in my tablet every night to charge have a show on while I try to fall asleep and wake me up in the morning with my alarm it takes it lets say and hour to charge it, and lets say i sleep 8 hours a night that means it could be mining while pugged in not pulling on the battery for 7 hours at a time. I plug in my phone at my desk at my desk four hours at a time and on the shelf at home at night thats a lot hours it could be mineing.
I have thought about getting a usb bit coin miner at plugging it into my personal file server at home as it sits doing nothing but waiting for me to either grab files off of it for hours at a time the power draw of a 2 or 3 miner chip is negligible and while not likely to get much would be fun.
I wish I had mod points today. This is a +1.
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Wouldn't constant bitcoin mining pretty much destroy battery life on any phone or tablet?
Dunno. But suppose it were designed to mine only when the device is plugged in. If my phone could mine enough Bitcoin overnight, when plugged in anyway, to cover micropayments for some paywalled articles for me to read the next day, it might seem worth it - even if I was paying more for the electricity than the mined Bitcoin was actually worth.
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You wouldn't cover the electricity cost.
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You wouldn't cover the electricity cost.
Correct, but the end user wouldn't notice or care about the electrical cost increase of 1-2 dollars a month. What they will notice is a subsidized or free device that can do things that other devices cannot do.
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nothing to see here citizen, you would like this chip on your personal device that you pay for in addition to paying for the device. and no we are not bit mining your data.
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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?
Re:But...batteries? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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If my phone could mine enough Bitcoin overnight, when plugged in anyway, to cover micropayments for some paywalled articles for me to read the next day, it might seem worth it - even if I was paying more for the electricity than the mined Bitcoin was actually worth.
Won't work. Cell phones and most tablets lack any sort of active cooling system; the CPU is not designed to run at 100% for any significant amount of time and will throttle itself soon it reaches a certain temperature. Heat also degrades li-ion batteries; running the phone "hot" overnight will slaughter the longevity of your battery just as effectively as leaving it in a car on a hot summer day.
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if this was cost effective way of turning electricity into bitcoins they would NEVER EVER embed it into mobile phones. they wouldn't even sell the chip, they would just put it in a warehouse somewhere to do it's thing.
also for some reason they think this chip _enables_ bitcoin payments on a mobile phone when in reality you don't need any chip like it for bitcoin payments on a mobile phone.
so it smells. it's a scam on some level or another.
bitcoin mining on a special chip in your mobile phone is a stupid ide
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If my phone could mine enough Bitcoin overnight, when plugged in anyway, to cover micropayments for some paywalled articles for me to read the next day, it might seem worth it - even if I was paying more for the electricity than the mined Bitcoin was actually worth.
Won't work. Cell phones and most tablets lack any sort of active cooling system; the CPU is not designed to run at 100% for any significant amount of time and will throttle itself soon it reaches a certain temperature. Heat also degrades li-ion batteries; running the phone "hot" overnight will slaughter the longevity of your battery just as effectively as leaving it in a car on a hot summer day.
we aren't talking about cpu mining but asic mining with a custom built dedicated chip the just mines the heat problems won't be as large as cpu or gpu mining
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Why not? Are ASICs magic chips that are not subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics?
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Why not? Are ASICs magic chips that are not subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics?
No they are just more effecient at doing what ever one task they are made to do.
Next up (Score:1)
Dogecoin
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This is an ASIC. From TFA:
"The concept is interesting, but every time you are doing an activity, even bitcoin mining, you are consuming power, even if it uses an ASIC," said industry analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy, referring to the type of chip 21 has developed, an application-specific integrated circuit.
Sounds like they are trying to build a distributed network of them. How well it will work remains to be seen.
I hope that this was a bad description... (Score:3)
If that is the idea; then sure, a 'bitcoin chip', is probably not the worst way to handle the problem(now, why any OEM would pay extra for the chip, the packaging, and the board space, rather than, say, just re-using the 'trustzone' stuff that basically all ARM cores have, or coaxing the 'secure element' that they are embedding to support some other contactless payment scheme into handling bitcoin related data, that's a much harder problem to answer). Assuming you don't fuck it up, it'll allow you to have a 'wallet' for bitcoins that isn't a total security disaster, is actually vaguely convenient in real life, and so on.
If the idea actually involves any 'mining' (beyond whatever bare-minimum might be needed for a wallet to initiate a transfer), though, this idea could scarcely be dumber. Bitcoin ICs are power hungry, achieve essentially zero gains from decentralization(modest resistance to datacenter fires, I suppose; but substantial additional bandwidth and control-node costs, plus the inability to concentrate them where electricity is cheap); and have so far become obsolete at a rate even faster than that of most cellphone components. Many of them don't even make it to customers before they burn more energy than they 'produce' in bitcoins; and the ones eating battery power, and baked into a cellphone for its entire life, sure as hell aren't going to do better.
At least the ones you keep at home are as efficient as electrical space heaters at converting electricity to heat, with some free math thrown in. In mobile devices, that isn't a virtue.
So what's the plan? Conceptually adequate, but probably doomed, smartcard-esque IC designed to implement a secure wallet; or utterly bullshit and completely crack-addled plan to distribute compute load to the worst possible places?
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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.
I know it, I know it! (Score:2)
Let's connect the dots.
Recently a study says standby appliances cost billion of dollars.
The energy companies then study alternative ways to waste energy, since possible regulation may come soon.
At one board meeting, the CEO asks "So how can we squander more energy?" and a young guy hesitantly raises hand and says "There is that thing called bitcoin mining, people waste electricity to solve cryptograph..."
"OK, let's force consumers to mint whatevercoin NOW"
more information (Score:5, Informative)
Jobs available backed by 121 million in VC funding- https://21.co/#jobs [21.co]
Companies investing 121 million in 21INC - https://www.crunchbase.com/org... [crunchbase.com]
More details - http://www.coindesk.com/21-int... [coindesk.com]
better article - https://medium.com/@21dotco/a-... [medium.com]
Reason Why Qualcomm may be so interested - https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Bitcoin might not be viable as a currency, but it is not a Ponzi scheme. Stop perpetuating this lie.
not ponzi (Score:2)
Re:not ponzi (Score:4, Informative)
just plain old snake oil
... that can facilitate tasks I cannot accomplish otherwise. Yes, let me have some more.
Suckers wanted! (Score:1)
If the chip was efficient enough to actually cover it's own cost, shouldn't 21 just build it's own cluster and print it's own money? Oh, it's not? Maybe we can get someone to pay for all of the electricity this thing uses and just throw them a few pennies every once in a while to keep them happy ......
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If the chip was efficient enough to actually cover it's own cost, shouldn't 21 just build it's own cluster and print it's own money? Oh, it's not? Maybe we can get someone to pay for all of the electricity this thing uses and just throw them a few pennies every once in a while to keep them happy ......
21 Inc revenue model isn't solely dependent upon 75% mining reward and tx fees but on the value added services that the devices take advantage of. The end user won't care about or even know their device is using bitcoin. All they will care about is the device being less expensive initially, and all the features like trust-less escrow, smart contracts, reselling and sharing bandwidth, ect.. that their devices will now provide them.
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HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
o wait... you are serious!
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HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA o wait... you are serious!
Why feign incredulity when the evidence over the last 30+ years reflects most people already are willing to pay slightly more per month for the opportunity of subsidized devices?
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you logic seems interesting to me... people are willing to pay more for something subsidized!!?? wouldn't the device by being subsidized be less and not more? i think you need to reread the shilling material again.
21 Inc is planing on giving away free or heavily subsidized products, that may end up costing the user more over several years of use because of the added energy costs.*
It is well understood among psychologists that most people opt for short term deals and opportunities vs long term projected costs.
There are many business models that are built around this fact. I.E..Cell phones, media entertainment systems, rent to own , car leases , and in many developing countries every single product sold in stores is o
Why ??? (Score:5, 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?... [youtube.com] 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.
Yes... (Score:2)
I can see Microsoft calling their buddy Intel and saying "Wanna make this required for Windows 11 and we split the profits?" PS, you get the foot the electric bill =)
I'm sure the rest will follow with phone versions... I don't see these being used to sell you a "free" or "reduced cost" device just pure cash for them with a microscopic subtext in a license/EULA/ToS somewhere.
Re:Why ??? (Score:4, Informative)
Any mining chip is doomed to failure. Within 6 months it will be worthless, incapable of mining more value than it costs to manufacture and run.
See all the other Bitcoin mining chips that have been released. They look powerful when announced, by the time people get them they are average, and six months later the difficulty level has risen far enough to make them worthless bricks or expensive room heaters. The more of them in existence the faster this will happen. That is how Bitcoin is designed to work.
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Any mining chip is doomed to failure. Within 6 months it will be worthless, incapable of mining more value than it costs to manufacture and run.
See all the other Bitcoin mining chips that have been released. They look powerful when announced, by the time people get them they are average, and six months later the difficulty level has risen far enough to make them worthless bricks or expensive room heaters. The more of them in existence the faster this will happen. That is how Bitcoin is designed to work.
Since ASIC miners become obsolete fairly quickly it may be a good idea to install them in disposable items the public typically upgrades regularly or items that serve multiple roles where they continue to be useful even after they stop being profitable. 21 Inc may be onto something.
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Other possibilities:
6) Once disassembled and made to work for the beholder instead of the creator, it turns any "21-equipped" device into a pair of Nike Air Jordans [wikipedia.org].
7) It's vapor. It's not as if $121,000,000.00 hasn't been raised on vapor before, and it's not like it won't be again.
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Other possibilities:
6) Once disassembled and made to work for the beholder instead of the creator, it turns any "21-equipped" device into a pair of Nike Air Jordans [wikipedia.org].
7) It's vapor. It's not as if $121,000,000.00 hasn't been raised on vapor before, and it's not like it won't be again.
The prototypes are already built and you can sign up to be put on a list to test them.
Re: Why ??? (Score:2)
I've got a prototype that will change the world.
Just give me a big stinking pile of money, and I will personally attest that you will be amongst the first to get the finished product into your greedy little hands.
(Aka, vapor.)
it's not free (Score:2)
The "free" SAAS services are not free. You're just paying for them in your utility bill instead of directly. There's no subsidy here, just a different billing method.
So if I buy a smartphone with this chip... (Score:2)
...what's in it for me? The answer is NOTHING. What's in it for the ATTs, Verizons, Sprints of the world is the question. If the players don't see an opportunity, this thing is dead in the water.
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...what's in it for me? The answer is NOTHING. What's in it for the ATTs, Verizons, Sprints of the world is the question. If the players don't see an opportunity, this thing is dead in the water.
Well, if AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint make money off of me having this chip in my phone, then they'll pass that on to me in the form of lower monthly fees*, right?
*$0.52 Bitcoin mining credit does not include $4.83 mining & micropayments surcharge.
I can't wait (Score:2)
To start mining bitcoins for our Wall Street overlords
Laugh (Score:1)
I'm going to use my Bitcoin to buy another battery for my phone, lately it seems to run down quickly.
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I'm going to use my Bitcoin to buy another battery for my phone, lately it seems to run down quickly.
These chips will be rolled out in many devices, not just cell phones. Most people leave their phones plugged in for hours after they are fully charged. This is where the mining will occur.
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So you think it's a good idea? This is what it sounds like to me, you will be of mining collective of which the lions share of Bitcoin will go to some corp, and the bit (no pun intended) you get will be used to pay your "micro transactions".
A snake eating its tail, and the monetization of simple things like browsing.
I can't imagine a bigger sucker deal.
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So you think it's a good idea? This is what it sounds like to me, you will be of mining collective of which the lions share of Bitcoin will go to some corp, and the bit (no pun intended) you get will be used to pay your "micro transactions".
A snake eating its tail, and the monetization of simple things like browsing.
I can't imagine a bigger sucker deal.
68% of bitcoin has already been mined. 21 Inc will be competing with traditional miners and other companies that will be forced to adopt like IBM, MSFT, AMD, Google, ect... I am quite fine with 75% of the bitcoins being used to pay for high tech engineering and programming jobs in these sectors to continue to roll out and secure blockchain based technologies.
Interesting slideshow from 21Inc I found - https://imgur.com/a/q9cbL [imgur.com]
This shows the next stage have a total capital expenditure of 8 dollars per devic
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This shows the next stage have a total capital expenditure of 8 dollars per device and after that near 0 CapEx.
8 dollars per device assuming it is in every net-enabled device. No capital expenditure assuming chip manufacturers decide to embed this in their products. Those seem like rather large assumptions to me.
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8 dollars per device assuming it is in every net-enabled device.
They are necessarily projections. The 8 dollar figure is the projected cost of a small rollout and not every net enabled device. 8 dollars is actually quite expensive for a single chip.
No capital expenditure assuming chip manufacturers decide to embed this in their products. Those seem like rather large assumptions to me.
They already have Qualcomm on board with a large personal investment. Isn't a 48 billion dollar company with a large list of skews good enough to start?
Paranoia (Score:2)
Lets say that the random numbers this bitcoin chip uses to generate hashes is designed to be breakable, or just bad.
What effect could that have?
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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.
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Lets say that the random numbers this bitcoin chip uses to generate hashes is designed to be breakable, or just bad.
What effect could that have?
You aren't exactly clear but I assume you are asking about backdoors being introduced within these devices to compromise bitcoin. If introduced this would undermine the devices themselves and not the blockchain. The exception to this rule is if over 51% of mining occurred by 21 Inc devices and there was a backdoor which was abused. In this case we must be concerned and prevent 21 Inc from mining all of its devices on a central pool regardless if their investors are mostly libertarians who have no interest i
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Last time I checked ( a year ago? ), the full bitcoin block chain was north of 9GB, and so is surely at least 10 GB now. What embedded device has that kind of memory to jack around with bitcoin mining? Even then it is like playing a small lottery: most people will never mine anything and those that do get a whopping 25 bitcoins, which will drop to 12.5 and then to zero before long.
you don't actually need the whole bitcoin chain history to work it has just traditionally been done that way as that is how the first client/miner worked and the pc/server/dedicated mining rig had more than enough space as storage at negligible cost in those devices but it isn't actually need now.
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Honestly, I would rather make micro-payments with Bitcoin than with a CC.
The advantage is that if my BitCoin payment is intercepted, it cannot be used to do anything nefarious (in fact this payment will be broadcast, so worrying about interception is foolhardy already), a CC transaction can be intercepted and the CC number used for all sorts of things.
This is the advantage to authenticating an action rather than an actor.
Bitcoin endgame? (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.
Three words that should strike fear in your heart (Score:2)
the worst idea ever (Score:2)