Okay, talk me into your $400 bitcoin miner raspberry pi using small words and on a timeframe concurrent with the 18-month Moore's Law window of its obsolescence.
Ok, but understand I do not have any opinion on whether or not this will work. My best guess is that this is a dev toy intended to crowd-source creativity and in an effort to spread the protocol as fast as possible. This can't be a mine-for-profit device. 21 Inc knows this. They have been mining, and I think that their hash power plus the pool created by this device is to solve blocks that will contain all these micro transactions that aren't paying fees. You can't have microtransactions unless you can have miners that want to include them, and this looks like both in one. If 21 Inc solves microtransactions this way, BOOM; you have a worldwide transactional ledger that every computer has read/write access to. It seems a musician could create a song, and people that play the song could pay the artist and the people that host it as it is played. Or you could trade your dollars for orange futures on your PC. This is the thing, three pages down:
Yes, it seems a chicken-or-egg stage. If it is widely accepted, not using it would be like surfing the web without a browser. However, as it stands, it's like having a browser, but no web pages to view with it. But, it may be even a steeper challenge than that, as this is hardware. This might be the perfect solution to someone's problem, but I don't know what that problem is. Then again, I'd rather buy 21 Inc's IPO instead of Twitter's. I can't estimate the bounds on the possibilities created here. It's like nothing at all, or holy crap everything is different now.
Cisco and Qualcomm do not try and sell you something that you might have marginal utility for at some indeterminate point in the future. I read part of whoosiz Horowitz of Andreesen Horowitz. It convinced me AH aren't good, they're lucky. Fuckin' $400 for something you can get from Newegg for $159 or Butterfly Labs for $50 is asinine.
Right!? But why the heck did they sign on? I'll buy it could be just for positioning, but there are very smart people at these companies that have been working along side 21 Inc for many moons. I have to think that the intended culmination of their efforts wasn't a bunch of bitcoin mining and an over-priced Raspberry Pi node. There must be an enterprise strategy, or maybe this can be stuck in Androids for a meshnet service? There must be another to market strategy.Cisco and Qualcomm do not try and sell you something that you might have marginal utility for at some indeterminate point in the future.
Damn, you aren't kidding. And they have thrown ridiculous amounts of funding at it. At $116m, they've got almost half the money thrown at Spotify. ...okay. Half of me is spitting out "micropayments bullshit, WTFever" and the other half of me is worrying at it like a dog at a bone. This is like the Voynich manuscript. It may be utter gibberish but what if it's notI'll buy it could be just for positioning, but there are very smart people at these companies that have been working along side 21 Inc for many moons.