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21's plan, as stated, is pure bullshit. The only question is whether they know it or not.
21's plan, as stated, is pure bullshit. The only question is whether they know it or not.
Let's do an order-of-magnitude calculation
An article from Life Hacker reports that it costs about $0.50 to keep your phone charged-up for a year:
Now, my phone gets pretty warm when it's charging so the new mining chip can't draw that much more power. But then again, a lot of times my phone is plugged in and already fully charged, and so the mining chip might as well be running. So let's say that 21 Inc. can boost the yearly energy consumption of the typical smart phone from $0.50 to $3.00 before people start to complain about "hot phones." $2.50 goes to mining bitcoins
We'll also make the assumption that the cost to mine the bitcoins is exactly equal to the market value of the mined coins. In reality, the first coins will probably be cheaper to mine, becoming progressively more expensive to mine as the network hash rate grows. But for our order-of-magnitude calculation, we'll assume that $1 of BTC cost $1 of electricity to produce.
At the current market value of ~$250 / BTC, this means that each phone will produce approximately
-> 0.01 BTC per year, or
-> 1,000,000 satoshis per year, or
-> 83,000 satoshis per month, or
-> 2,700 satoshis per day
For comparison purposes, note that the current dust limit is 540 satoshis. This means that the amount of bitcoins generated by the phones is not insignificant (when compared to the dust limit) over time periods measured in days, weeks or months.
Let's go further
The same Life Hacker article claims that:
Quote from: Life Hacker
Global smartphone shipments (which includes people upgrading to newer phones) will reach 567 million units [in 2012] alone.
Let's be ambitious and assume that eventually 21 Inc. chips will be included with 10% of the new smart phone shipped (~57 million phones). The total bitcoins produced by these phones would then be
57,000,000 x 0.01 BTC / year
= 570,000 BTC / year
Or about 1560 BTC per day. Since there's presently ~3600 BTC mined per day, these 57 million smartphones would contribute
~43% of the network hash rate.
If 75% of these mining rewards flow back to 21 Inc and its partners, that works out to
0.75 x 57,000,000 x $2.50 / year
~= $107,000,000 per year
This means that the expected revenue is not insignificant.