The 21 Bitcoin Computer is the first computer with native hardware and software support for the Bitcoin protocol. That means the hardware to provide a constant stream of bitcoin and the software to make that bitcoin useful for buying and selling digital goods. Developers use the 21 Bitcoin Computer to quickly create apps, services, and devices that can be rented or bought for bitcoin.
The 21 Bitcoin Chip is an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) specifically designed to provide a constant stream of bitcoin to your computer as a system resource.
The 21 Bitcoin Computer can be connected to any Mac, Windows or Linux computer with a USB port. It can also be used as a standalone Linux machine.
The 21 Micropayments Server is a modified web server that allows you to make any internet accessible resource payable in bitcoin.
The 21 Command Line Interface (CLI) is a collection of tools that enable you to quickly mine BTC at the command line and use it to buy and sell digital goods.
The 21 Bitcoin Computer mines bitcoin in the background so that you usually do not have to even think about whether you have a ready supply for programming purposes. And if you do temporarily run out, you can use the 21 Command Line Interface to mine a quick hit of bitcoin.
The amount of bitcoin mined in this fashion is inherently stochastic; the uptime of your 21 Bitcoin Computer, the global network difficulty, your local network connection, and random factors all typically enter into the process. Moreover, the amount you get may be augmented by your contribution to the network, such as whether you are running a full node and whether you are providing digital goods and services in exchange for bitcoin.
With all that said, we have optimized the 21 Bitcoin Computer to ensure that under normal operating conditions you will always have a constant stream of bitcoin for development and micropayment purposes.
Any internet-accessible digital good or service is a good candidate for buying and selling with the 21 Bitcoin Computer. For example, you can sell paid APIs like machine translation, rent out a 3D printer, or take BTC in exchange for microtasks like tweeting.
No, we are not taking a portion of your mined bitcoin. If anything, users who are good participants in the network - by doing things like running full nodes and buying/selling digital goods - will receive much more bitcoin than they would by simply running a mining device alone.
Yes, you can indeed make a profit with the 21 Bitcoin Computer. However, you would do so not by directly selling bitcoin, but by selling digital goods for bitcoin. That is, you are not going to get rich by immediately selling the bitcoin mined by the device for offline currency, but you can potentially do very well by selling digital goods and services to others for their bitcoin.
This should make sense: Bitcoin mining for the purpose of selling BTC on an exchange has the economics of a commodity business, while your globally accessible Bitcoin-payable API can have the economics of a software business.
If you do want to pursue the commodity business of mining-to-sell-for-dollars, you can certainly try to use the 21 Bitcoin Computer for that purpose as it does have a highly energy efficient chip— but that is not the intended use.
The short version is that your margins on bitcoin earned by selling digital goods and services with the 21 Bitcoin Computer are likely going to be much better than your margins from bitcoin mined with the 21 Bitcoin Computer. That is because the 21 Bitcoin Computer allows you to use bitcoin as a true digital currency for taking worldwide payment for your APIs. The mined bitcoin just provides continuous liquidity into the system.
As for the long version, think about storage as an analogy. If you buy a laptop, it is not a particularly lucrative idea to try to sell the storage directly as a commoditized product. The price of a byte of storage is relatively cheap and there are many alternatives. However, if you use that storage to create a screenplay or business plan which you then sell, you might be able to make quite a lot of money. In the same way, think of the bitcoin generated by the 21 Bitcoin Computer as a system resource like storage. Up till now no computer has provided sufficient native software and hardware support for the Bitcoin protocol to make the bitcoin generated by a mining chip useful in the same way that storage is useful. We think you will find that the 21 Bitcoin Computer starts solving that problem.
The network of 21 Bitcoin Computers does not work like a typical mining pool, so these concepts do not apply. It is set up to give you a close-to-continuous stream of a small amount of bitcoin for development purposes — rather than a lumpy, randomly timed block reward intended for selling on an exchange.
We have worked hard to make sure that typical users of the 21 Bitcoin Chip will not need to worry about their chip specs in order to have a continuous stream of mined bitcoin under standard operating conditions. Subject to that proviso, the 21 Bitcoin Chip has an efficiency of approximately 0.16 Joules per Gigahash and can calculate 50-125 Gigahashes per second. For developers who want to use hardware mining acceleration in their applications, full device drivers are provided with the 21 Bitcoin Computer. For bulk purchasers interested in full datasheets, please email [email protected].
Patience - we will be adding support for this! However, the deeper answer is that we think payment in BTC is not as big an improvement at the present time over standard ways to purchase macroscopic physical goods. Offline currencies are fairly well adapted for that use case. We believe that where Bitcoin really shines is for micropayments, as a medium of exchange for digital goods and services.
Yes. The 21 Bitcoin Computer ships with a WiFi adapter, RPi 2 chassis, power adapter, 128 GB SD card, USB-to-laptop cable, and everything you need to run it either as a standalone machine or to provide bitcoin to a Mac, Windows, or Linux computer.
Yes, which is why it comes with a full copy of the Blockchain pre-loaded on a 128GB SD card. The computer will briefly synchronize with the network when you plug it in, after which point it will run as a full node by default without further intervention.
As we have noted above: this is a machine built for developers and early adopters. Both Bitcoin itself and peer-to-peer commerce of the kind enabled by the 21 Bitcoin Computer are new technologies -- and as we’ve seen in the past, there is going to be a long burn-in period before we fully understand all the security considerations that will arise in production deployments. We are working with some of the best folks in the business on this - but the freedom to sell code to anyone comes with risk.
Nevertheless, we side with freedom. The web browser has shown that with the use of techniques like sandboxing one can execute arbitrarily complex code from remote machines while maintaining an acceptable level of security. We are optimistic that the use of similar techniques can comparably limit, if not completely eliminate, the security issues around peer-to-peer commerce.
You can order the 21 Bitcoin Computer here and it will ship on November 15, 2015.