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Rejoice, the ’21 Bitcoin Computer’ is here. But what is the 21 Bitcoin Computer? Here’s your education. 1st & foremost, the aim of the 21, let’s call it that in the interest of brevity, is to put the bitcoin system into every phone & computer. This computer is said to be like some earlier plug & play device made to mine bitcoin.
But what the 21 is also designed to do is offer a test bed for bitcoin-based activity like sale of signed digital goods, the ability to rent out system time for bitcoin, & accept bitcoin on an e-commerce site. You can also launch a server to perform basic bitcoin functions. Essentially, it’s a Raspberry Pi connected with a custom bitcoin-mining ASIC.
So what exactly is the 21 Bitcoin Computer?
Officially, the 21 claims to be the 1st computer with native hardware & software support for the bitcoin protocol. Which means this baby is the hardware to mine a stream of small amounts of bitcoin for development purposes, & the software to make that bitcoin useful for e-commerce.
The 21 can be used to create bitcoin-payable APIs, set up your own personal digital goods store, pay people to share your Content Online, or host Online games of skill. For real world goods, you can also use the 21 to rent out any Internet-accessible device on a per-use basis. So you can allow people to submit paid print jobs to printers and 3D printers for bitcoin, for example.
Basically, the 21 Bitcoin Computer allows anyone to sell anything over the Internet for bitcoin just by plugging a device into the wall & typing a few commands.
How do you use it?
Like we said earlier, you can simply plug the 21 Bitcoin Computer with your keyboard & monitor as a standalone Linux box, or plug it in to provide bitcoin over the Internet to any existing Mac, Windows, or Linux machine. Once you do that, you can programmatically interact with the bitcoin network as easily as you can connect to the Internet.
The 21, released mid-November, has been developed by a team of 4 & produced with funding from Qualcomm, Cisco, & Andreessen Horowitz.
Image Credit: 21 Bitcoin Computer
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