Balaji Srinivasan, co-founder and CEO of 21 Inc, announced the launch of the 21 software package at the Consensus 2016 blockchain conference, allowing anyone with a computer to receive bitcoin.
Freely available, the software allows any connected device to join the 21 network, enabling connectivity with the 21 Marketplace and providing capabilities that were previously only available to owners of the 21 Bitcoin Computer.
Srinivasan told the audience: "What we think is that there is going to be a third Web, the Machine Web, where the links are actually payments between machines." According to Srinivasan, the World Wide Web is the ‘first web’, consisting of documents connected to one another. The second is the social web, providing connectivity between people directly through technology.
In his presentation, Srinivasan argued for the ability to enable machines to be able to pay other machines, effectively monetizing HTTP.
"The concept is a web where machines are earning bitcoin on every HTTP request," he explained. "Every time you load a webpage is a HTTP request. That’s a lot of HTTP requests. If you are earning bitcoin on every HTTP request, that could be a lot of earned bitcoins."
One of the immediate use cases: digital paywalls. Teasing Paul Vigna of The Wall Street Journal , Srinivasan walked through the example of signing up for the newspaper.
"You either need to sign up for the paywall or you are paying Google ad based microtransactions," he said.
But Srinivasan also used the example of Amazon Web Services, which requires that users sign up for an account, enter their personal information and pay monthly with a credit card. He explained that on the machine-to-machine Web, there is no reason to sign up for anything. Many avenues to bitcoin During the presentation, Srinivasan walked through the various means by which the 21 software can generate […]
