Bitcoin has been around since 2009, and for years regulators, economists, and technologists have debated what to call it. Some rejected the currency label entirely. Others pointed to it as digital cas
Bitcoin has been around since 2009, and for years regulators, economists, and technologists have debated what to call it. Some rejected the currency label entirely. Others pointed to it as digital cash done right. The IRS settled on commodity. The European Union's Court of Justice disagreed, classifying it as currency instead. But there's another categorization that doesn't get much attention: system resource.
Right now traders treat bitcoin as a speculative asset. But 21 Inc sees a different future. The company, known for its 21 Bitcoin Computer, believes bitcoin could become a fundamental resource built into devices the way processing power, RAM, hard drive space, and bandwidth are today.
In computing, a system resource is anything with finite availability. A laptop ships with specific amounts of RAM, processing capacity, and storage. More expensive hardware comes with more of all three, which matters if you want to run demanding software or juggle multiple apps at once.
21 Inc's vision runs deeper. What if a device's bitcoin balance determined its ability to send value across the internet without human intervention? Such autonomous payments don't exist yet. But they could. A computer might pay for digital content or bid for computing resources on other machines. An application might require bitcoin to run. If that happened, everyone's devices would need some.
That's the philosophy CEO Balaji S. Srinivasan laid out when 21 Inc announced its launch. "Conceptually, we believe that embedded mining will ultimately establish bitcoin as a fundamental system resource on par with CPU, bandwidth, hard drive space, and RAM," he wrote. "That is, one can imagine the ultimate thin client in which a system designer consciously chooses a relatively slow CPU but a relatively strong 21 mining chip, using the bitcoin generated therein to purchase computation in the cloud."
The implications extend further. Instead of paying Comcast for broadband, a user might connect to a bitcoin-incentivized mesh network built and maintained by neighbors. Instead of storing family photos on a device's hard drive, a household could put everything in decentralized cloud storage. When a device can earn and spend bitcoin on its own, the need to buy a computer with a massive processor or huge storage drive shrinks. It buys what it needs in the background, on demand.
None of this exists yet. But if bitcoin becomes necessary to operate certain applications, the architecture of computing itself shifts. Right now it's obvious why every device needs an internet connection and storage. In 21 Inc's vision, bitcoin becomes just as fundamental.
