Block, formerly known as Square, has announced that it is building its own bitcoin mining system. The company which is run by ex-Twitter CEO and BTC maximalist, Jack Dorsey, focuses solely on financial services and bitcoin development and has been a force in the space especially since Dorsey announced his involvement in the company. This time, it has turned its attention to bitcoin mining as part of its aim to make mining accessible for all.
Block Getting Into Bitcoin Mining
Back in October 2021, CEO of Block Jack Dorsey had tweeted the firm’s intentions to get into the mining space by building a bitcoin mining system. This system would be based on custom silicon and free to access for individuals and businesses across the globe as it would be open source. Now, less than three months later, the vision is becoming a reality as Block takes the first steps towards building its bitcoin mining system.
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One of the problems raised by Dorsey was the fact that bitcoin mining needed to be more distributed. Currently, mining BTC is an expensive endeavor and as such is only accessible to those with funds to power it. Block is looking towards the future to make the network more decentralized even after the last BTC has been mined, and one way to do that is to make mining a more efficient process.
By making the hardware required to mine BTC more readily available, Block plans to curb the bottleneck of having an inefficient mining process. “Mining isn’t accessible to everyone. Bitcoin mining should be as easy as plugging a rig into a power source,” Dorsey said in his Twitter thread.
Bringing The Plan Together
Thomas Templeton, Block’s general manager for hardware, took to Twitter to announce that the company had indeed taken the first steps towards making bitcoin mining an easier process for everyone. Templeton explained that Block had started out by reaching out to the community to learn about their experiences with mining, focusing on customer pain points and specific technical challenges.
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They found that availability, reliability, and the performance of mining rigs were the major hurdles that customers have had to jump to get into mining. Additionally, the energy consumption of these machines was too high for it to be a profitable venture for a solo BTC miner. This is why Block is working to make it a smoother and easier process.
BTC reocvers above $42,000 | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com
It’s yet to be announced when the system will be available to the community. However, Templeton confirmed that the firm was already beginning to build out its teams for its bitcoin mining system. “We’re incubating this investigation within Block’s hardware team and are starting to build out a core engineering team of system, asic, and software designers,” he stated.
Featured image from Quartz, chart from TradingView.com