Jack Dorsey’s nano Bitcoin mining chip heads to prototype
Block, a financial services and technology company owned by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has announced it has completed the prototype design of its new five-nanometre (5nm) Bitcoin (BTC) mining chip — which it claims is key to decentralizing the supply of Bitcoin mining rigs.
According to a blog post published on April 28, Block explained that developing Bitcoin mining ASIC rigs is both financially and technically challenging. The result of this has been “the excessive concentration of custom bitcoin mining silicon” in the hands of a select few companies. Block deems this centralization harmful to both miners and the Bitcoin network as a whole.
We have an update on our mining initiative. This one is about ASICshttps://t.co/bJOM9YNxfl
Notably, the San Francisco headquartered company wrote that it plans to make Bitcoin mining technology “open source” where possible by selling standalone ASICs and other hardware components to “optimize innovation and maximize the size of the Bitcoin mining hardware ecosystem.”
The post adds that the steps taken over the past few months will allow the firm to experiment with new designs and aid them in bringing more efficient and affordable Bitcoin mining chips to market. In order to fast-track this development push, Block added that it has purchased a large batch of ASIC chips from Intel.
On April 18, Intel announced that it would halt taking new orders for its Blockscale 1000 Series ASICs by Oct. 20 and end shipping in April 2024 as part of cost-cutting measures. Block says this large intake of ASICs from Intel will help accelerate the development of its proprietary 3nm chip, which it claims upon its release, would be the most advanced chip to date.
The scale of a nanometer (1nm) is
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