Jack Dorsey’s Nano Bitcoin Mining Chip Goes To Prototype

Block, the financial services and technology business founded by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, has announced completion of the prototype design of its new $28,628 five-nanometer (5nm) Bitcoin mining chip, which it believes is critical to decentralizing the supply of Bitcoin mining rigs.

Block said in a blog post published on April 28 that building a Bitcoin mining ASIC machine was financially and technically difficult. As a result, an “over-concentration of specialty bitcoin mining silicon” in the hands of some businesses has occurred. This concentration, according to Block, is bad for miners and the Bitcoin network as a whole.

Specifically, the San Francisco-based business said it intends to make Bitcoin mining technology “open source” as much as possible by selling standalone ASICs and other hardware components to “optimize innovation and maximize the size of the Bitcoin mining hardware ecosystem.” .”

Actions taken in recent months, according to the article, will allow companies to experiment with new designs and help them deliver more efficient and inexpensive Bitcoin mining chips to the market. Block also said it has ordered a large number of ASIC processors from Intel to accelerate this development.

As part of its cost-cutting initiative, Intel said on April 18 that it would stop taking new orders for the Blockscale 1000 Series ASICs on October 20 and complete deliveries in April 2024. Block believes that Intel’s very large intake of ASICs will help accelerate ASIC development. its own 3nm device, which it claims will be the most advanced chip to date upon release.

“We can now exclusively focus our design team on developing state-of-the-art three-nanometer ASICs.”

One nanometer (1nm) is roughly the width of two silicon atoms. As chip components get smaller, more transistors can fit into a silicon mold of the same size. Electrical current travels a shorter distance in a circuit to complete a calculation when the overall size is reduced, which implies that the overall efficiency is increased and the amount of heat generated is reduced.

It’s worth mentioning that 5nm ASIC processors have been available for a while, with Canaan, a Chinese mining company, releasing its first 5nm ASIC in 2021. Most Bitcoin mining ASICs now operate on 5nm processors, however, no manufacturer has released their ASIC chip designs yet. open.

ASIC stands for “application-specific integrated circuit” (ASIC), which refers to a computerized device adapted to perform a single computing function and is often used to mine Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.