My point is that if the home user is not paying the tax on mined coins, they are not getting (any mined coins and thus not) a discount on their monthly electric bill, thus what incentive do they have to keep the miner running always?
Warm water or air (or toast, possibly)
I thought these were going to be sold very cheaply nearly free since the electricity cost is the major cost.
Otherwise what incentive do I have to buy one.
Cheaper product cost. It's the subsidized-
handset heater business model.
It is not very compelling. A heater is a major home appliance that lasts for 10 years or more. A cell phone is a device you need to replace every 2 years or so, gets lost, gets stolen, gets dropped, etc.
Sounds like 10 years of lock-in to me. The manufacturer will be getting coins until it breaks down or is replaced. Nice revenue stream.
The NAV of a heater is already very low compared to the much higher monthly expenditure.
The monthly expenditure is the same whether you mine or not, so it is effectively zero here.
The barriers to entry to this market were not $116 million. It hasn't been done because it isn't that compelling.
I don't know about the $116 million. As I said I have essentially zero confidence that because VC's invested in something it is actually a good idea or a good business.
But as far as it not being done before I think you just don't understand the mining or silicon IP markets very well. ASIC mining has only been around for 18 months or so. 21 has been funded and working on their embeddable mining (and whatever else) technology for a good portion of that time.
Bitcoin needs to reach at least 10% adoption before it makes much sense.
Sure, so in that case the $100 million is a long shot bet on what at that point might be an owner of embeddable silicon IP worth many billions if and when BTC adoption is 10%.
There is another reason you idea can't possibly work. The consumer will demand the heater works even when connectivity is down
That's easy to do. Just mine and burn the hashes. The business case for the subsidy is that the manufacturer will mine a lot of BTC, not that uptime will be 100%.