Quote from: brg444 on September 22, 2015, 06:44:46 PM

Quote from: Sine(X) on September 22, 2015, 06:34:12 PM

The price is absolutely incompetitive. Chinese will make it (if this product is good Huh

) much cheaper - so where is a profit?
To my mind it's a great laundering of money, my condolences for investors.

This "Bitcoin computer" is obviously not their business model.

Yep. Not sure if anyone has mentioned this yet, but in further thinking about the biz model (see my last post in this thread), I don't see why this little computer isn't a authorization/subscription service management machine. If customer wants to use X service provided by Y (which might be 21, an affiliate, partner, etc), the customer will need to prove they have authorization to access the service. Ordinarily, that would be through creation of an account on the company's server, which is hackable. For 21, authorization to access service X might be a function of a 1 satoshi transaction to the 21 servers from the BTC computer. So, mining profitability doesn't matter (and neither does storing user info); what matters is a constant supply of satoshis, which supply is generated just by plugging the machine in and mining on the 21 mining pool. For example, maybe 21 is going to try and compete with Netflix. If you want to use their streaming service (and Verizon predicted yesterday cable companies will be dead in 10 years, everything will be streaming), you have to use their box which can't be faked b/c it relies on btc transactions on the blockchain.

EDIT - I remember a 21 presentation at Goldman Sachs a few months ago (I watched the video on the GS website, I don't work for GS). At the time, they were thinking that their platform would make mining for profit obsolete because everyone would be mining and most transactions would be a fraction of a bitcoin. BTC Computer seems consistent with what was discussed that day at GS.