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Block, a financial and technology company owned by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, has announced the completion of prototype development of its new five-nanometer (5nm) Bitcoin (BTC) mining chip, which it claims is the key to decentralizing Bitcoin supply. mountain towers.
According to a blog post published on April 28, Block explained that the development of ASIC mining rigs for Bitcoin is complex both financially and technically. The result of this has been “an over-concentration of specialized bitcoin mining silicon” in the hands of a select few companies. The block sees such centralization as detrimental 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
— Thomas Templeton (@TempletonThomas) April 28, 2023
Notably, the San Francisco-headquartered company wrote that it plans to make Bitcoin mining technology “open source” where possible by selling offline 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 help them bring more efficient and affordable bitcoin mining chips to market. Block added that in order to speed up this development, he purchased a large batch of ASIC chips from Intel.
On April 18, Intel announced that it would stop accepting new orders for its Blockscale 1000 series ASICs by October 20 and stop shipping in April 2024 as part of cost-cutting measures. Block says that this high number of Intel ASICs will help accelerate the development of its own 3nm chip, which it claims once released will be the most advanced chip to date.
“Now we can focus our development team exclusively on developing advanced 3nm ASICs.”
The nanometer scale (1 nm) is roughly equivalent to the width of two silicon atoms. As parts of chips get smaller, this allows more transistors to be placed on a silicon die of the same size. By reducing the overall size, the electric current travels a shorter distance in the circuit to complete the calculation, which means that the overall efficiency is increased and the amount of heat generated is reduced.
Related: Mine-inflation: The cost of mining one bitcoin in the US will rise from 5 thousand dollars to 17 thousand dollars in 2023
It’s worth noting that 5nm ASICs have been around for a while, with the earliest 5nm ASICs released in 2021 by Chinese mining company Canaan. Currently, most Bitcoin mining ASICs run on 5nm chips, however, no company has made their ASICs open source.
ASIC stands for “Application Specific Integrated Circuit” (ASIC) and refers to a computerized device that is optimized to perform a single computational function and is commonly used to mine proof-of-work cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.
