Bitcoin Mining Chip From Twitter Co-Founder Jack Dorsey Enters Prototype Stage: Details

Block’s Bitcoin mining chip will make Bitcoin mining easily accessible for more individual miners, as well as up and coming crypto mining firms.

Written by Radhika Parashar, Edited by Manas Mitul | Updated: 1 May 2023 14:58 IST

Bitcoin Mining Chip From Twitter Co-Founder Jack Dorsey Enters Prototype Stage: Details

Photo Credit: Reuters

Jack Dorsey had announced the development of his Bitcoin mining chip in October 2021

Highlights

Samsung is also working on a 3nm Bitcoin mining chip
These mining-specific chips make the process more energy efficient
Dorsey is looking to make this chip available for use as soon as possible

Jack Dorsey, after resigning as Twitter CEO in 2021, shifted his focus toward building Block, a Web3-friendly financial services company. In a fresh update from Dorsey's Block, the Bitcoin mining chip that this newly founded company has been working on, has entered the prototype stage. The former Twitter chief is hinged at decentralising Bitcoin mining and taking it out of the hands of a few established platers. This chip being designed by Block will make Bitcoin mining easily accessible for more individual miners, as well as up and coming crypto mining firms.

Dorsey's prototype design showcases a new five-nanometre (5nm) Bitcoin mining chip. When this project started, Dorsey's focus was to develop custom silicon that is essential to facilitate Bitcoin mining and he is marching ahead towards launching this chip soon.

“We plan to make our Bitcoin mining technology open source where we can. We intend to make it possible for third parties to use our hardware and software solutions for their own further development, by selling standalone application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and hardware components, and providing extensive support and reference resources. We seek to optimise for innovation and maximise the size of the bitcoin mining hardware ecosystem,” said an official blog post from Block.

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A team of ASIC designers has been assembled to develop the initial design of the Bitcoin mining chip. Now that this chip has entered its prototype mode, the team behind it has called it a ‘milestone development'.

“This is an exciting milestone which will allow us to experiment with design variants, validate our design work, and calibrate our testing on real silicon. We expect to receive the prototypes back this fall. They will be a valuable input into our three nanometer ASIC development work,” Block's post added.

In recent years, the process of mining Bitcoin has become more difficult with more advanced computers operated by mining companies and independent miners having joined the system.

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Miners have to solve complex algorithms on advanced computers to mine a Bitcoin. The mining chips for Bitcoin came into existence to make the otherwise power intensive process, energy efficient.

Dorsey's Block is among other tech companies that are now dabbling in the creation of Bitcoin mining chips to slash the high level of centralisation on bitcoin mining ASICs supply, that has been deemed detrimental to Bitcoin miners as well as the network resiliency of the Bitcoin blockchain.

Last year in June, Samsung started trials of its three nanometre (nm) foundry processing chip, that would be able to facilitate the mining of Bitcoin.

US-based chipmaker Qualcomm has also shown interest in taking advantage of Samsung's ASIC chips, Bitcoin Magazine reported.

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Further reading: Cryptocurrency, Jack Dorsey, Bitcoin Mining Chips, Block

Radhika Parashar

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Radhika Parashar is a senior correspondent for Gadgets 360. She has been reporting on tech and telecom for the last three years now and will be focussing on writing about all things crypto. Besides this, she is a major sitcom nerd and often replies in Chandler Bing and Michael Scott references. For tips or queries you could reach out to her at RadhikaP@ndtv.com. More