Hacker News Reader

Why a 21 Bitcoin Computer? It doesn't take a whole lot of horsepower to run a wallet.

Second - I've read through the article a couple of times, and I'm just not seeing why said computer would need to have 'built-in mining' to implement this.

Kind of tempting to throw together an implementation that shows this, or at least leads me to discover why it would be needed :/

View on HN

The 21 Bitcoin Computer is meant to be a general purpose "dev kit" for Bitcoin, it's not just a wallet. Think of it like a microcontroller dev kit: they are large PCBs, with I/O pins, LEDs, flash, ram, and all the peripherals to cover most needs for most projects. The 21 Bitcoin Computer is the equivalent: it has hardware for mining, for just acting as a Bitcoin relay node, and for acting as a wallet.

I think it's mainly meant to be convenient to start developing services at some point and messing around with the minor amount of satoshis that the chip can provide.

$400 might be a bit much for people on this, I feel like they'll need to modify the price and/or the machine in order for people to fully embrace the idea.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com