Jack Dorsey’s nano Bitcoin mining chip goes to prototype
Block, a financial services and technology company owned by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, has announced that it has completed the prototype design of its new five nanometer (5nm) Bitcoin (BTC) mining chip – which it claims is key to decentralizing the supply of Bitcoin mining rigs.
According to a blog post published on April 28, Block explained that developing Bitcoin mining ASIC rigs is both financially and technically challenging. The result of this has been “the excessive concentration of custom bitcoin mining silicon” in the hands of a select few companies. Block considers this centralization harmful to both miners and the Bitcoin network as a whole.
Specifically, the San Francisco-headquartered company wrote that it plans to make Bitcoin mining technology “open source” where possible by selling standalone 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 in recent months will allow the firm to experiment with new designs and help them bring more efficient and affordable Bitcoin mining chips to market. To speed up this development, Block added that they have purchased a large batch of ASIC chips from Intel.
On April 18, Intel announced that it would stop taking new orders for its Blockscale 1000 Series ASICs by October 20 and end deliveries in April 2024 as part of cost-cutting measures. Block says this large intake of ASICs from Intel will help accelerate development of its proprietary 3nm chip, which it claims at release will be the most advanced chip to date.
“We can now focus our design team exclusively on cutting edge three nanometer ASIC development.”
The scale of a nanometer (1nm) is roughly equivalent to the width of two silicon atoms. As parts of the chips get smaller, more transistors can fit into a silicon mold of the same size. By reducing the overall size, the electrical current travels less distance in the circuit to perform a calculation, which means the overall efficiency is improved and the amount of heat produced is reduced.
Related: Mineflation: The cost of mining a Bitcoin in the US rises from $5K to $17K in 2023
It’s worth noting that 5 nanometer ASIC chips have been around for a while, with the earliest 5nm ASIC being released in 2021 from Chinese mining company Canaan. Currently, most Bitcoin mining ASICs run on 5nm chips, but no company has open-sourced their ASIC chip designs.
ASIC stands for “Application Specific Integrated Circuit” (ASIC) and refers to a computerized device that is optimized to complete a single computational function and is typically used to mine Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.
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