Bitcoin company 21 Inc unveils a 'Bitcoin computer' for developers

On September 22, Bitcoin company 21 Inc has announced its first consumer product - the 21 Bitcoin computer.

The computer will retail for $400 and will include a custom mining chip, a backend data center, and a custom Linux-based operating system. The product is expected to be available in November, according to the Wall Street Journal.

In a blog post, 21st Century CEO Balaji Srinivasan wrote:

“The 21 Bitcoin Computer is the first computer that uses native hardware and software that supports the Bitcoin protocol. If you are an entrepreneur or developer, with this pocket-sized device, you can use Bitcoin from the command line to buy and sell digital goods and services in real time.”

Ben Horowitz, co-founder of the famous venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and one of the company's major investors, said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that the design of the 21 Bitcoin computer can make M2M (machine-to-machine) payments easier, which in his opinion is difficult to do now.

Horowitz said it’s not yet clear what the 21 Bitcoin Computer will enable developers to build, but he sought to point out the similarities between it and early web browsers.

“These things, without some enabling technology, can’t happen,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

In a blog post, Srinivasan listed some of the product’s specific features:

1. Mine Bitcoin instantly via the command line;

2. Selling APIs for Bitcoin is like English-Chinese translation or document conversion;

3. Build your own digital merchandise store, similar to iTunes;

4. Can act as any Bitcoin-rentable IoT hardware device, from smart password locks to 3D printers;

“The reason you can do all this so quickly is that the 21 Bitcoin Computer includes a built-in 21 mining chip (so you can easily buy things with Bitcoin), and it also has a built-in 21 micropayment server (so you can easily sell things for Bitcoin), and all of this functionality is accessible from the 21 command line interface,” Srinivasan explained.

The product will reportedly include a Wi-Fi adapter, Raspberry Pi 2, power supply, USB-to-laptop cable, and a 128GB SD card, and it will also come with a "factory pre-installed" copy of the blockchain.

According to the company, the machine’s computing power is between 50GH/s and 125 GH/s , and its power consumption ratio is about 0.17 joules/GH.

For more information about this product, you can find it on the official FAQ page of 21 Company.

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