The new &quot;buffered mining&quot; and predictive mining features they announced take more of the risk out of mining. Not only do they have a pool to ameliorate the variance of finding a block, but they remove the risk of the difficulty varying, and even give you advance payments on mining before you&#x27;ve done it.<p>By taking out all the risk, variance, and profit, 21 is step-by-step approaching a design where customers just <i>buy</i> bitcoin with money. Except they <i>feel</i> like they are mining, with a very wasteful, expensive, inefficient chip.<p>Buying bitcoin was the right design all along. Eventually, 21 might discover this, if they can get over all the sunk costs they&#x27;ve invested in making mining chips without a market.