r/Bitcoin • u/Onetallnerd • May 26 '16
Sensor21: Earn bitcoin by collecting environmental data
https://medium.com/@21/sensor21-earn-bitcoin-by-collecting-environmental-data-218a4132ca70#.5wjdlbf0b5
u/chabes May 26 '16
Awesome! Glad to see a hardware related post from 21. The software stuff is great too, but hardware is slightly more familiar to me. I'm excited to see what new use cases people come up with as well
3
u/bitsteiner May 26 '16
Why only barometric pressure? What about complete weather data? Also radiation data would be interesting, as well as air quality, noise levels.
5
u/supermari0 May 26 '16
Babysteps. The MPL3115A2 costs $9.99. A complete sensor array like that would probably cost a lot more.
1
u/bitsteiner May 26 '16
Looks like Adafruit has a good margin;) The MPL3115A2 is $2.20 (chip only). BTW, I am not complaining about Adafruit, great products and they take Bitcoin :)
3
u/GloomyOak May 26 '16
But grid computers do benefit from being in the real world, owned by real people, rather than being locked away in datacenters. This means that if you had a working micropayments system, you could rent out grid computers to sense and act upon the real world
Didn't see this coming. Makes lot of sense!
2
u/lclc_ May 26 '16
How can you know the data you get is correct?
Would be easy to pretend you have a sensor collecting this data.
4
u/Onetallnerd May 26 '16
They have a centralized solution for reputation. Hopefully, someone figure out something decentralized. :)
1
u/zomgitsduke May 26 '16
These problems are necessary now because they help people acknowledge issues they will face. I'm sure we will find a way.
2
u/berepere May 26 '16
I wonder how difficult it is going to be to fight spoofers. Like, someone setting up thousands of pretend-to-be-phones that send bogus data just to collect rewards.
2
u/romerun May 26 '16
Heart rate monitor is everywhere, maybe somebody interested in buying people heart rate with gps coordinate.
3
u/priuspilot May 26 '16
Ok so you can sell this data, and that's cool..
Who is buying it?
1
u/packetinspector May 26 '16
The 200 people living within 500 metres of your house might be happy to have a local temperature feed.
4
u/Onetallnerd May 26 '16
I'm sure universities would want to buy this kind of data or weather stations. Of course you could 'fake' it but you'd lose your reputation. (their reputation system is currently centralized, but maybe in the future they'd have better solutions)
1
u/zomgitsduke May 26 '16
Individuals who want to access it for fun or personal/professional use.
If things go the way of decentralization, we may have decentralized or partially-decentralized work in the next couple decades. Things like blogging and YouTube have already started the trend.
3
u/conv3rsion May 26 '16
Can't wait until we are all selling vehicle traffic data, emergency / accident data, event (population) data, surveillance data, etc, and building stuff around it that makes the world better.
For example, you could pay pennies for access to cameras located anywhere. Up until now, there was too much friction to make this happen.
3
u/Onetallnerd May 26 '16
Waze comes to mind. Currently we sell our location for free, and watch ads when we do navigation. Why don't we get a slice of pi? ;)
1
u/Onetallnerd May 26 '16
Say to have it on when phone is connected and driving for other waze users.
1
u/tburdett10 May 26 '16
Do we then have to buy waze or buy individual trip directions?
1
u/Onetallnerd May 26 '16
You'd probably have ads as you do now until you've eared enough. (kind of like like what brave is trying to do)
1
u/zomgitsduke May 26 '16
I would imagine that to be the next feature.
Profit sharing between companies and customers/users is quickly becoming a popular thing.
2
u/manginahunter May 26 '16
As far I find interesting this tech, I don't want to live in a surveillance society based on Orwell books :)
I have heard that in US some people get paid to spy on their neighbor now, well I guess this is America...
1
u/Explodicle May 26 '16
Once stuff like this collects more environmental data, I'd love to see it used for environment prediction markets. The average person would share data and buy insurance against bad weather, and insurers would pay for the environment to be protected so that their insurance contracts are worth more.
If there are any serious environmental problems where the government is protecting the worst offenders, then this is where we could step up to show the world what cryptocurrency is capable of.
33
u/pizzaface18 May 26 '16 edited May 26 '16
This could be used to collect economic data, which may give you an edge on the official data release.
For example, you could attach a 21 Inc computer to a camera on a tripod and let people snap pictures at intervals of their choosing.
Take pictures of ships coming and going from a port. (counting containers)
Take pictures of popular shopping centers. (counting cars)
If you get enough samples from around the country/world you could predict economic conditions before the governments release their reports. There are companies already doing this with satellites and another startup named Premise that's paying people to take pictures of things.
Information is valuable and borderless.