Secretive Bitcoin Startup 21 Reveals Record Funds, Hints at Mass Consumer Play

This is interesting because it's the first time I've heard about 21 and they have raised $116 million pre-launch. Given that companies who've raised an order of magnitude less are all over the news, it's surprising they have been so stealth.

I'm also still not clear what 21 does. According to the article they are building out the blockchain into the internet of things (IoT). That sounds really vague. Plus, the article mentions a contractual twist - like smart lawyer contracts. These two things don't seem to obviously go together.

21 Inc was previously 21E6 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=334759.0 who was in the news back in 2013

What percentage of that funding is just buying and holding Bitcoins? Many of these large rounds have that business model baked into the amount they raise. There's much more profit to be had from buying at current prices and selling at a consumer inflection point than there is in actually building a Bitcoin service.

I believe there are proposals to allow pruning the blockchain, but I'm not 100% sure on the details.

To guarantee a transaction goes through you have to wait for it to be confirmed, but most transactions really aren't that important/high risk, so beyond checking that the address does actually have the money, it's instantaneous. Many payment processors (I know Bitpay has this option) actually take the 0 confirmation transaction risk, allowing customers to pay instantly.

Transaction fees are not high, with a typical fee of .0001 bitcoin (3 cents), which is small compared to credit card fees. While work needs to be done converting to/from cash, actually using bitcoin (that you already have) to buy things is a better experience than using credit cards. You simply grab your phone, scan the QR code, and hit send. This is much better than entering your credit card for the thousandth time on another website, or being redirected to paypal, entering your password, and choosing your preferred payment option for the thousandth time (stop asking me to use Paypal Credit!).

Using an Android wallet such as Mycelium, or a desktop wallet like Electrum doesn't require you to download the entire blockchain, and although that comes at the cost of some trust, I personally don't find that problematic.

Basically, bitcoin has some problems, but I think some of your criticisms are no longer applicable to most everyday usage of it.

The blockchain ends up being useful as a public secure ledger, so perhaps it's going to be used in that way somehow.

Otherwise, I don't know of many companies who've actually worked into the space of the less well-known features of bitcoins that can be used via the embedded pseudo-language.