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- Jack Dorsey’s firm, Block, announced designing a 5nm Bitcoin Mining Chip prototype.
- Twitter’s former owner says that this chip would facilitate decentralizing the supply of BTC mining rigs.
Bitcoin mining is about to witness a new revolution after suffering greatly for some time. Jack Dorsey’s financial services and technology company, Block, designed a 5-nanometer Bitcoin mining chip prototype. The former owner and CEO of Twitter argue that the chip is the key to decentralizing the supply of BTC mining rigs.
Jack Dorsey Reveals Bitcoin Mining Chip
In a blog post published on April 28, 2023, Block explained that the development of Bitcoin mining ASIC rigs is challenging on both the technological and financial fronts. This exercise has resulted in “the excessive concentration of custom Bitcoin mining silicon” in the hands of selected companies. The company argues that this centralization is harmful to the miners and network.
Block is headquartered in San Francisco and wrote in the blog that the plans to make Bitcoin mining technology “open source” are possible by selling standalone ASICs and related hardware components. This would optimize the innovations and significantly advance the horizons of the Bitcoin mining hardware ecosystem.
The post further highlights the steps taken over the months, which would allow the firm to experiment with new designs and help them bring efficient and affordable mining chips into the market. Block has purchased a large batch of ASIC chips from Intel to speed up the development process.
However, Block feels that this huge order would help them accelerate the development of its proprietary 3nm chip, which is believed to be among the most advanced. The blog states that:
“We can now focus our design team exclusively on cutting edge three nanometers ASIC development.”
On April 18, 2023, Intel announced halting new orders for its Blockscale 1000 Series ASICs by October 20, 2023, and the shipping of the orders will not exceed April 2024; this was done as a cost-cutting measure.
Further explaining, the blog says the scale of 1 nanometer is almost equivalent to the width of two silicon atoms. When the chip gets smaller, it creates space for more transistors to fit into a silicon die of the same size. When the overall size is reduced, the electric current has to travel a smaller distance in the circuit to perform calculations. Thus, the overall efficiency increases, and the heat is decreased.
It should be noted that the 5-nanometer ASIC chips have been available for quite some time, with the first one released in 2021 by a Chinese mining firm Canaan. As of current statistics, most Bitcoin mining ASICs run on 5nm chips. However, this is the first company that has made its ASIC chip design open source.
Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) is a computerized device optimized to complete a predefined single computational function. They are customarily used for mining in Proof-of-Work (PoW) cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
At press time, Bitcoin was trading at $28,476.58 with a drop of 2.77%, value against Ethereum gained 0.54% to 15.46 ETH. Its market cap suffered by 2.77% to $550 Billion, and trading volume gained 82.73% to $18.9 Billion. At the same time, the Bitcoin hash rate is 385.85 EH/s; this represents the global BTC network hash rate with a mining difficulty of 48.71 T at the block height of 787,805.
Andrew is a blockchain developer who developed his interest in cryptocurrencies while pursuing his post-graduation major in blockchain development. He is a keen observer of details and shares his passion for writing, along with coding. His backend knowledge about blockchain helps him give a unique perspective to his writing skills, and a reliable craft at explaining the concepts such as blockchain programming, languages and token minting. He also frequently shares technical details and performance indicators of ICOs and IDOs.
