In March it announced the impressive list of investors including Andreessen Horowitz and RRE Venture, Qualcomm Inc., founders of giants PayPal, Dropbox Inc., Expedia Inc. and some others.
The 21 Bitcoin Computer, an innovative project of 21 Inc., allows buying and selling goods or services for Bitcoin. The product, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal, is expected to ship in November.
Rather than take the magic to the press, the 21 Bitcoin Computer landed direct to Amazon for pre-order by enthusiasts, developers, and suckers. Whether developer or entrepreneur, those interested in reaching the new destination can go ahead and get a 21 Bitcoin Computer, he says.
The 21 Bitcoin Computer will enable users to instantly mine Bitcoin from the command line, sell API calls for Bitcoin, like English-to-Chinese translation or file conversion, set up personal iTunes-like digital goods store, reward peers for posting their links on social media, make any IoT hardware Bitcoin-rentable, from smart locks to 3D printers. “The utility of bitcoin up until this point has been the speculation value,” said Srinivasan to the newspaper.
The 21 Bitcoin mining chip that is included in the Bitcoin computer itself isn’t that useful.
I’m very excited about it. The thing that’s completely missing that I think would make the Internet better would be machine-to-machine payments.
Most importantly, it is created to be the first computer that is Bitcoin-optimized with native hardware and software support exclusively for the Bitcoin protocol. “It’s just amazingly hard to do right now”. And we want to use the success of the 21 Bitcoin Computer to help make Bitcoin the next fundamental system resource, available by default on every new computer. “These things can’t happen without some enabling technology”, he told the source. Instead of profiting from the actual mined currency, 21 Inc. states that most will profit off the sale of the services and products purchased using Bitcoin.
Miners also have a job to approve transactions over the network and it’s from this that Bitcoin gets its reputation as being so secure due to the sheer number of miners that are working on the network. “That’s a relatively straightforward application if you have machine-to-machine payments”, he said.