Dorsey’s Buys Bitcoin Mining Chip as Intel Cuts Production

The business that processes payments may begin selling Bitcoin mining gear as early as the next year.
This recent purchase of a substantial quantity of bitcoin mining chips from Intel by Jack Dorsey’s fintech-payments startup, Block (SQ), will speed up the company’s intentions to join the market for mining gear just as the chipmaker is winding down manufacturing.

In addition to concentrating on developing its cutting-edge 3-nanometer chips, the company will benefit from the acquisition by increasing its ability to bring mining robots to market. As part of its plan to cease manufacturing the bitcoin mining application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), which Intel said it would do in February 2022, the company has slated April 2024 as the last month of ASIC production.

Block said in a blog post published on Friday that it had taken advantage of a recent chance to purchase many of these ASICs from Intel. This company intended to complete the design of a Bitcoin mining chip with a 5 nm process node during this quarter and then construct machines based on that design. According to the article, the acquisition enables the team to concentrate only on creating the 3-nanometer device.

When discussing the design of chips, the term “nanometers” refers to the dimensions of each transistor. A chip is composed of millions of transistors packed closely together. The smaller the transistors, the more that can fit on a chip, which allows it to execute more computations and ultimately results in a more powerful device.

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In an interview with CoinDesk, Block’s hardware head Thomas Templeton said that the company’s first-party goods would be released at the beginning of the next year. When asked about the number of chips they purchased, he said it is sufficient to bridge the period until they can develop and manufacture their 3-nanometer processors.

Block has said that one of its goals is to increase the degree to which the Bitcoin network is decentralized. When it comes to mining,

the main problem” is “the diversity of manufacturing and supply chain,

according to Templeton. We want to develop more tools so that more people can build things with them and utilize them. When one investigates mining in greater depth, one will discover that the ASIC is at the core of mining.

Two companies have a dominant position in the mining manufacturing industry: Bitmain and MicroBT.

Block announced in March that it was in the process of developing a mining development kit. This kit will enable other engineers to manufacture devices that use Block’s chips. According to the company, this will make available to software developers a set of tools that may facilitate innovation in Bitcoin mining technology. Templeton said that Block is publishing the source code for this technology as open source because the company wants the community to participate in the development of the technology.