News Start-up announces embedded Bitcoin chip

but if mining bitcoins barely covers the electricity used, i don't see how this helps unless you only charge your device when it's not at your own property.....

 

An embedded mining chip, particualrly in a power-constrained device, is moronic,. An embedded blockhchain handling chip, however, could be very useful - the equivalent of the trusted key store that allows phones to act as NFC EMV payment cards.
But with the amount of waffle and doubespeak on the companies blogpost (and complete lack of concrete details), I don't trust them to actually deliver a useful chip rather than a worthless flash-headline-grabber.

 

I'm trying really hard to see a way in which this is a useful idea, but I just can't.

The example involving a thin client doesn't work, the value produced by the device would be proportional to the value of a bit coin, which can change dramatically from day to day, so there is no guarantee that it would be sufficient to pay for any significant amount of computation time.

Even if the embedded chips produced bitcoins at a significant enough rate, their widespread use would inevitably cause the mining difficulty to increase, diminishing the value of the computing power.

 

I'm just glad I purchased 1,000 BTC when they hit $1

 

I bought 4 for a negligible amount of money, sold for £35 each

Regret that now