In other words, their business model depends on deception and ignorance.
"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."
BTW, I like the concept, but it has to make economic sense in order to succeed.
We should probably wait to review the specs and GH/Watts before judging them. It may be beneficial to the consumer , them and the bitcoin marketplace.
My primary concern deals with centralization of mining and if they will allow the end user to select their own pool for the 25% in hashing that is shared with the user. Hopefully they realize we will not tolerate one company or pool to control 51% or more of the hashrate . If they cared about the ecosystem they would allow mining to be done on a p2p pool by default not controlled by any one entity.
I am hopeful they will make the right decision as several of the large investors in 21 Inc are both libertarians and heavily invested in bitcoin where they are concerned for the longterm viability.
Now this is a subject that we should focus on and be prepared for. If they go live with ASICs in routers we will see a major increase in hashrate. How do we handle that?
There is no way for traditional miners to compete with their margins. They should immediately start negotiating with other companies like IBM, InTEL, google if they wish to survive.
Also how do we handle the fact that 21inc will have most of the freshly generated coins? I'm assuming that consumers will NOT hold their satoshis directly. Their share will go to 21inc and they will have some sort of credit. Having the consumers directly hold the satoshis from the stars makes it very complicated and bad things will definately happen.
If Qualcomm starts giving out free routers and extremely cheap androids than other companies like Samsung and Apple will have to copy their business model. It would be likely to expect that multiple of these companies to compete for a share of these bitcoins. As long as the the ASICs are being produced by several competing companies or partnerships not in collusion I am Ok with them fighting over for a share of them remaining 32% of bitcoins as those profits will go towards high tech jobs to roll out new products and services for our ecosystem.