Bitcoin’s Best Bet Yet!
A mysterious new company is quietly changing the Bitcoin game. In fact, they’re plotting to change core-internet rules too.
21 Inc popped up last year and even without a clear business plan it quickly securing funding from tech-investing luminaries including Andressen Horowitz, Peter Thiel, and Vinod Khosla. Today’s it’s Bitcoin’s best-funded start-up. And finally we know why.
The company is creating an entire ecosystem for Bitcoin, computing hardware to applications. And investors see that 21 Inc. can be to Bitcoin what Apple was to computers, revolutionary.
The company’s first product, the Bitcoin Computer, teaches developers everything they need to understand the digital currency. For $400 developers can access an entirely new customer pool. The computer itself is a small device that plug’s into a MAC or PC and gives owners the ability to create software, or smartphone apps, to buy and sell goods based on the Bitcoin payment platform.
By targeting developers, 21 Inc’s flipping on its head previous attempts at getting the mostly confused public (you and me!) to understand, and use Bitcoins.
21 Inc. followed up the Bitcoin computer with a micro payments marketplace, allowing machines to earn and spend bitcoins. Yes, it sounds decidedly boring and that’s the point.
It’s a wicked smart business strategy to push Bitcoin adoption among app creators BEFORE pushing adoption among customers. Some are calling this “re-imagining how the internet works.”
Co-founder and CEO, Balaji Srinivasan, is the man you want to know. And here are his thoughts about where 21 will take Bitcoin: READ
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Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, call Srinivasan a “genius technologist” and “spiritual leader of the bitcoin movement.”
Srinivasan’s moved from Biology to Bitcoins over two decades in academia and commerce. He co-founded the genetics testing company Counsyl from his Stanford-dorm room and currently teaches Stanford’s Bitcoin Engineering course, where he previously taught computational biology. Perhaps, unsurprisingly he’s also board partner at Andreesen Horowitz.
This breadth of intellectual capacity across biotechnology, bitcoins and business also informs his unafraid thoughts on the intersection of life and technology. For instance, how technology may have the answer to eternal life!
Watch Srinivasan explaining Bitcoin’s future. I find the part after 11:30 most insightful:
Srinivasan’s vision may well be ahead of their time. Then again, so were Steve Jobs’.
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