By Scott Robinson (@ScottWRobinson)

tl;dr: 21 Inc’s strategy seems to be to take an exciting, hard-to-understand technology, and market the shit out of it.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Marketing is essential to just about every business and is a good thing when used responsibly. Plenty of companies out there market their products and brands they way they should be.

And then there are the companies that don’t. Specifically, I’m referring to 21 Inc, the company behind the 21 Bitcoin Computer. They make numerous claims on their website that I have issue with:

“Plug in your 21 Bitcoin Computer to get a stream of bitcoin on your Mac, Windows, or Linux laptop.” “The 21 Bitcoin Chip means your 21 Bitcoin Computer has access to a constantly replenished source of bitcoin.” “…you can now write programs that connect to the Bitcoin network just as easily as they connect to the Internet.” “…it’s a tool for making passive income at home by selling access to your software and assets for bitcoin.”

All of the above are true statements, as far as I can tell. But they are misleading true statements. Here are my rebuttals:

The computer/chip will not net you any profit in mined bitcoin. There are too many people out there with far more power to mine bitcoin, vastly lowering your chance of earning anything. See above. Any money earned (say, through a mining pool) will be insignificant. This has always been possible. In no way is this new. If you have a product to sell in exchange for bitcoin, then you likely have a product to sell for dollars (or other currency). If your customers only pay via bitcoin, then there are many, many, many options out there for receiving bitcoin. Want to avoid the fees? You’d better plan on earning more than $80,000 to justify buying a $400 computer for your payments system (based on Stripe’s 0.5% fee structure). Oh, and there are some great open source libraries to do this for you for free. No specialized hardware needed.

Some people argue this will revolutionize IoT. Really? Our toasters will be buying/selling on our behalf? Will I be pimping out my coffee maker to my neighbors? All jokes aside, this can all be done with just a Raspberry Pi.

“Bitcoin-enabling” everything could have some useful applications, but I don’t see this as a practical way forward. For example, a hardware implementation of something like the bitcoin protocol/blockcain could be useful in IoT (or computing in general) if it was used for general purpose transactions, like messaging (see Ethereum). Unfortunately this isn’t the case, nor is this how the product is marketed.

Maybe I’m being overly critical of a first-gen product, but I just don’t see why this is useful or why its been getting so much attention. Essentially, you’re paying $400 for a Raspberry Pi ($40), an under-powered mining/blockchain chip, and some pre-installed software.

Just take a look at the Hacker News comments on this. To me, that says it all. This is a developer-focused product, and the developers aren’t impressed.

To summarize why I’m disappointed:

The misleading marketing speak

The $400 price tag

The amount of press backing up the misleading claims

The ridiculous amount of funding with little to show

I hate to be critical and not offer an alternative solution, so here is what you should do instead of buying the 21 Bitcoin Computer:

Buy a Raspberry Pi

Install Bitcore

Buy and attach one of the many USB miners

Install BFGMiner

Good luck, have fun.