21's big idea......$75M of funding

I’m concerned that this is a massive con job being played on the owners of these devices - a kind of legalised theft.

Users won’t understand, or be able to measure the cost to them, in energy use. They will see device A generates bitcoin, of which they get a tiny slice, and probably at a subsidised price. The alternative, device B therefore costs more, doesn’t generate bitcoin, but seems otherwise identical. And it is, just it uses a tiny bit less power.

The cost in energy use will be very small, but over years of use will add up, and with billions of such devices each generating tiny amounts of revenue for 21 and their partners, it will add up to a lot of money in bitcoin. But paid for unwittingly by the device owners, this is capitalism at its must devious and parasitic.

At least that’s how it looks from here.

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It seems to look terrible from whatever angle you look at it…it’s like it takes all the various potential virtues and totally inverts everything - a total Dark Mirror image of Safe…it should be called “Dangerous”… :smiley:

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It’s just ‘The Black Stack Nomos’ being fleshed out :wink:

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Actually, 21inc chip could make things less expensive for customers and companies.

  1. username / password / email / secret question / SMS / phone call / scan documents verification is costly, hard, expensive, prone to hacking, victim of social engineering
  2. micropayment authentication with bitcoin is better, cheaper, and more secure, replaces all these Kluge-centric strategies, the ball of bandaids approach can be replaced by a steel core ball.

Why?

My IoT devices do not have to authenticate outside of my local network. So why would I want a chip (using mW power) added to my devices so it can work for 21 & Co and send them whats left over in daily authentications with a server outside of my network.

Authentication (if required) now does not require anymore than a service running on a local machine and using opensource software (eg linux), there is no cost.

21 is not about making it cheaper for us, although they hope it will seem like we are making a cent or two (while they reap it in). They are about centralising control (mining fees, mining coins, authentication etc) and the money flowing with it. Its about making money leveraged off the backs of everybody/device out there.

As others have said it is questionable if people would actually make any money and could even find that after additional electricity & device costs that they have actually lost money. We are likely to be talking of a few dollars a year that someone may lose or cents they may gain. And this is while 21 is reaping the money from all the things they can think of that we will have to start paying for in future. Paying for website access, paying so our devices can access any network, network cards paying so they can connect to your hone lan, and so on. We don’t pay or need those things now, so why complicate it all and charge us for it.

Of course the SAFE network can do those things in the future without compromising privacy and 100% of any money made stays with the user not some centralised fat cat.

21 will have the info on every device out there, how, when, long, the device was operating, and of course you will have to register so that this can happen. A world where everyone has to register their devices or else give up 100% of the micro mining to 21 and pay hard cold cash to use the net. One company with all the details on every device, network card, etc linked to the registration details of the owner. Not cheap at all.

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I think 21 is onto a great idea that will sell well…

Facebook does great… Most people are not that worried about privacy, weather they ought to be or not.

Overall, I do think symbiotic micropayment graft is the ideal way to kill advertising and to make spamming and Denial of service expensive…

SAFE is better – But it’s a marketplace of ideas, and we shall see what the market buys.

SIBIL and DDOS attacks become infeasible when there is a micropayment authentication per node or per get, respectively

And don’t forget email spam. e-mail that costs a tenth of a penny to send would be way better than email that is free to send, would make spam less of a problem.

Use bitcoin, wait 10 minutes for everything; or rely on third party services to help you, and let them store you keys and interfere with your life somehow; + ledger every single piece of toast you bake in your toaster so that google can better sell advertising; heh so you can wait 10 minutes for everytime you turn on your lights or something;

The bitcoin and the devices running bitcoin doesn’t sound like a good idea at all :slight_smile:

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Someone raised the point to me the other day that one of 21’s big challenges will be getting the OEMs to put the chip into their devices. This could be a lengthy and expensive process.

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So if I said to you, oh I can do this, but it will cost everyone on the earth who uses website etc, their privacy (even if small amount of it), they have to give me some of their power (oh its only a watt worth per person), and oh yea I become the richest person because you all now have to register every device with my server and pay a tiny amount out of the pittance you get for mining for me.

How would you feel?

NO - lets go another way that is open sourced, secure, private, any monies earned belongs 100% to the user and no extra overheads to register every thing to a central repository. SAFE and apps on safe can do all this and the user is in total control if s/he wants to spend coinage. And that coinage can be earned at a hugely greater rate than 25% of any micro mining ( which is required just to access the net) can offer.

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They will need to convince everyone who makes devices to incorporate their chip in the design. So it could be a couple or a few years before these inventions reach consumers. Bitcoin reward will be in half in 2016, There is a perfect fibonacci on Bitcoin today; any money manager will agree that it has bottomed. If bitcoin goes mainstream with ‘legitimate’ businesses with capital; Then their idea could become successful, and process the transactions for the future of bitcoin for eternity;

and that is worth the 116 million USD that has been poured over there to get this going from this perspective (above).

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Phew…that dispels all the concerns expressed in this thread then… :smiley:

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Having a chip that does private key / public key on every device should increase privacy, not decrease it. Giving hashes to a mining pool does not give up privacy. I don’t see the basis for everyone screaming the end of privacy, i think they don’t know much about mining bitcoin.

I’m thinking that all the other plans Intel has for its own shiny new all singing, all dancing devices, (all the cool kids want) and the incentives for joining their Network in usability terms, could make the whole thing quite popular, very quickly which would then incentvise other OEM’s to join in wouldn’t it? The link/relationship between 21 and Intel is worrying me.
My understanding is that Intel makes the vast majority of chips and the rest mainly AMD? My concern is that the chips will become ubiquitous, then possibly made compulsory (eventually).
My main question would be -What prevents the situation that if you want to keep up with the latest gadgets/tech, your only option is to install the telescreen that goes with it? Otherwise, you will be back to the stone age in info/communications/tech etc. It creates a Society where only those voluntarily giving up their Civil Liberties can fully interact with the rest of Society. I see this as an example of what happens when you base your morals on voluntaryism - the Govts/Corporations take the piss and remove your Civil Liberties by stealth - by clever "Economic Theories/arguments and marketing.
Ooops…went into a bit of a rant then…where was I? … :smiley:

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The basis would be the fact that to access anything on the Network, an auditable, date-stamped micro-payment is sent each time. This tracks a users movements and activities in a provable way. If a "node"behaves “suspiciously” it can be accessed/monitored further. This is the reason for the “screaming”.

Knowing much about Bitcoin mining would not appear to be relevant.

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Location information is not going to be included in the microtransaction. Activity is not going to be included in the microtransaction. There is an incentive to minimize the data involved in the handshake to make the microtransaction processing as inexpensive as possible, adding gps coordinates or activity codes to the handshake would be contrary to this incentive.

Isn’t it better than username/password, facebook login, browser-saved password info, or persistent cookies?

Lol,Ok, I’m not the best qualified person to dispute any of the tech ability claims you make, so hopefully you can help allay my fears.

The wallet/device will still be known though, yes…possibly along with any warranty/guarantee personal details etc. A large number of devices also have GPS. The first web site you visit that requires personal details automatically creates a link between person and device. Every website you visit will be known and when you visited. Can you pin down where any of this is not feasible. Thanks

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Who do you think is going to install the private/public key pair for people, someone has to have in order for it to be used. If one has 10 devices in the house “earning” for them, there would need to be a way to consolidate those micro earnings. Or else the battery charger example would have 25% of the micro mined BTC and nowhere to spend it. Oh that’s right it spends it by authenticating every time it charges a battery, but what’s left over from that cost would realistically be in a wallet/BTC-address. What happens if the charger’s wallet/BTC-address has no coins left, does it not charge the battery, guess so, otherwise what’s the point of authenticating.

This requires that the private key is exposed to at least the owner of the device, but who sets it up in the first place. And I DOUBT it will be self generated, because how then does the charger give the key pair to the owner, also it would be easy to back calculate millions of predicable key pairs using their die set. (other encrypted hard wired devices have been cracked too). You see the issue, its not in the micromining area, but in the logistics of actually managing the earned BTC and the key pairs.

There is going to be 99% of the users who will have zero knowledge of key pairs and how to handle them let alone finding out the key pair for their charger, so they can consolidate the earned BTC and actually use up their BTC to be allowed to communicated with web sites.

Now the good people at 21 will provide you with a wallet and when you register your device they will use the public key it advertises to link to the private key 21 has on record. Then your earned BTC can be maintained. Oh and the fees for consolidating and/or spending the earned BTC will go to none other than 21.

And to think network cards would also not work without payment, and what about the fridge. Must have valid authentication otherwise what is the point.

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It will be in AU with our meta-data laws.

Your ISP provides location data from every packet sent. Be it house address or cell tower your location is known.

When you register your devices they will record certain information, and for device authentication to work they will have to also register identification of some sort so that they can know the device is used in the right lan otherwise it is an unauthorised connection and fails authentication. The idea of authenticating devices on a global scale is filled with issue that never concern the average sysop who enables any sort of device authentication in their own network. They only have to worry that the device is in the correct subnet (if required)

Easily done, data warehouses do this easily.

But much more profitable to collect in data warehouse to process and on-sell for advertisers.

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Actually this link is made when the user registers the device for micro-mining. 21 will maintain this and likely sell the info to whoever pays them for it. Imagine a public key address as your device’s ID to be known across the web. Charge the laptop on holidays and the ISP earns money by giving 21 location of that public key, who then sells it to google, apple, yahoo, etc for advertising purposes.

Still worth a lot of money even if your personal ID (name/address/ID) is not given out because of privacy laws (do they exist in USA)

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