Why the fan?
What's the idea of a fan on a RasPi? Not like it generates that much heat.
Move over, mega-miners: an Andreessen-backed venture is going to beat off your data centre rigs with $400 worth of Raspberry Pi-powered brick. Rather than take the magic to the press, the 21 Bitcoin Computer landed direct to Amazon for pre-order by enthusiasts, developers, and suckers. Units will actually ship in November …
I've read the article and the Amazon listing and I still don't know what this does extra that can't be done with free software.
$400 could buy you a Th/s+ Antminer which would pay back some of that $400, then by choosing the right moment to sell on the Antminer would leave you a little profit.
I suspect the power consumption is probably low, looking at the barrel connector. However the commensurate hash rate is also low at a guess. The picture shows just one chip with no markings on it. Assuming the chip is an BM1385 (as a first guess) then 30 GHash/s and a power draw of about 10 Watts.
Mind you, assuming my very crude guesses are right, then the Antminer S7 is about 150 times faster for three times the cost, so this is very bad value for money.
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Hmm... This has got to be some elaborate scam or something to try to get rich selling junk.
Like others have said, no mention of hash rate, which is key for bitcoin mining. Also, just read the "testimonials", which all appear to be made up
"If I were 21 today, I'd learn Bitcoin" - Marc Andreesen, Inventor of the web browser
"Bitcoin could be the internet's next big protocol" - Padmasree Warrior, Former CTO of Cisco
"Are you a developer? Then you need to get a 21 Bitcoin computer" - Ben Horowitz
"The blurb is a bit vague but sounds like this is aimed at setting up internet commerce and performing transactions in Bitcoin."
I wouldn't need that huge (well not that big I guess) heatsink and fan to run the Pi. This thing does have a Bitcoin mining circuit (often times an FPGA) attached.
Anyway... I'm assuming the bitcoin mining speed isn't too quick? Don't know for sure, but generally the bitcoin rigs that have any resonable chance of ever making you a bitcoin use 100s-1000W of power, they'd have a much larger cooling system than pictured in TFA; and the (seemingly) more reasonble setups are enough slower than the high-end rigs that you're chance of ever mining a bitcoin are pretty low.
and subsequent comments from people commenting who have absolutely no clue what the fuck they're talking about. First of all, if you think this device was designed and/or is being marketed with its hash power as a focal point or attribute than you clearly aren't too familiar with the climate of the current crypto-space (i.e. proclivity towards mining becoming (seemingly) inevitably more centralized) and how, in part, this device attempts to tackle that issue head on. It's also not a Raspberry Pi, it's a proprietary board and its process came complete with prefabs and the whole process believe it or not. Does it have similarities spec. wise? Sure, but what dev. boards aren't in at least the same arena in that regard? It's pretty unfortunate that the author of this garbage attempt at journalism? is a direct reflection of the mind behind the words, words a lot of readers will even more unfortunately take at face value. It's clear you've not done your home-work one bit, if you had watched or listened to Balaji S. Srinivasan speak about the project, its purpose, or his feelings about blockchain tech., Bitcoin, and what his thoughts about the future behold, you would then have been able to publish something with perhaps one dab of fucking credence, instead you fueled a fire of retarded comments being..well..ignorant - trying to take jabs and commenting on something they truly don't know about. If this board were aimed to make a profit by mining, it would have been released 2+ years ago. The hash-power it pushes could barely stack an alt-coin with a $100,000 M.Cap, let alone BTC. With that, re-think it's purpose, or don't even bother and just read about it without THINKING you already have a grasp first.
What is its purpose, then? Since all the upvoted comments so far seem to agree with the viewpoint that this thing is largely useless, we're clearly all in an echo chamber, congratulating ourselves on seeing through the BS whilst having missed the point.
So what, pray tell, is the real point?