I’ve had my 21 Bitcoin Computer for about a week now. I ordered it without much research so I didn’t really know what I was going to get. After a week of playing around with it I can say that it is much different and more interesting than I thought it would be.

First of all, I wasn’t aware that it was a Raspberry Pi. A lot of people are rubbed the wrong way by that, due to the $400 price tag. It doesn’t bother me. I think having a computer that can be mining bitcoin within 10 minutes is impressive. Especially for someone who has never successfully set up a miner in the past. The ASIC is probably the most expensive part anyway. The ‘onboarding’ was simple and fun. I was impressed.

Within 10 minutes I was watching the satoshis roll in. There is a nice status view you can get to by running:

21 mine --dashboard

The 21 CLI mining status dashboard

And that’s it. If you just want to mine that’s the end of the story. But, this is the least interesting part of what you can do with it. At this point it’s no different or better that setting up mining on your own, although it is much easier. By far the most interesting part is interacting with other computers on the network.