With its signature hardware product now shipping to users in the US, Canada and Europe, 21 Inc is seeking to roll out its next stage in development, a decentralized, bitcoin-incentivized network of the devices.
21 Inc announced the launch of Ping21 today, a new proof-of-concept it envisions as a competitor to website monitoring services such as Pingdom or AlertFox. Today, webmasters use such services to determine how a website is performing in different markets, in the case of Pingdom, paying between $13 and $454 a month for the service.
What 21’s grid now allows is that Bitcoin Computers all around the world to be called with a single command, a factor the company said offers advantages over the pinging networks of today.
For example, a company’s website might be up and running in New York, but in Florida, Spain, and South Korea, there could be problems. However, with the Ping21 service, a webmaster could issue a single command and receive the uptime and status of their website in dozens of countries.
Rather than paying the hundreds of dollars for a subscription, the cost per ping would drop significantly, the company said. By utilizing its recently launched Micropayments Marketplace , a client can submit a request to the network along with bitcoin for payment.
Bitcoin Computers enrolled in the Ping21 service will then be automatically contacted to perform a ping, check the website, collect any necessary data and submit it back to the marketplace where the user can aggregate stats.
Afters its launch, the company is focusing on allowing developers to expand on other applications for its bitcoin-incentivized grid.
21 CEO Balaji S Srinivasan told CoinDesk: "It’s a proof-of-concept to show what kinds of services you can offer via decentralized bitcoin-incentivized grid computing and how they are qualitatively different from – and complementary to – what […]
