The 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.B T c) Mining Chip – which it claims is the 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 are financially and technically challenging. The result has been an “excessive concentration of custom bitcoin mining silicon” in the hands of a select few companies. Block sees this centralization as harmful to both miners and the entire bitcoin network.
We have an update on our mining initiative. It’s about ASICshttps://t.co/bJOM9YNxfl
— Thomas Templeton (@TempletonThomas) April 28, 2023
Specifically, the San Francisco-headquartered company wrote that it plans to make bitcoin mining technology “open source,” where standalone ASICs and other hardware components will be sold to “optimize innovation and shape the bitcoin mining hardware ecosystem.” possible to maximize”.
The post states that the steps taken over the past few months will allow the firm to experiment with new designs and help bring more efficient and affordable bitcoin mining chips to market. To fast-track this development, Block said it has purchased a large batch of ASIC chips from Intel.
On April 18, Intel announced to Stop taking new orders for its Blockscale 1000 Series ASICs as of October 20th and end shipping in April 2024 as part of cost-cutting measures. Block says this big intake of ASICs from Intel will help accelerate development of its proprietary 3nm chip, which it claims will be its most advanced chip ever when it’s released.
“We can now focus our design team exclusively on state-of-the-art three nanometer ASIC development.”
The scale of one nanometer (1nm) is approximately equal to the width of two silicon atoms. As the parts of the chips get smaller, it allows more transistors to fit in the silicon Die of similar size. By reducing the overall size, the electric current travels less distance in the circuit to perform calculations, which means overall efficiency is improved and the amount of heat produced is reduced.
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It’s worth noting that 5 nanometer ASIC chips have been around for some time, firstly with the 5 nm ASIC. Releasing in 2021 from the Chinese mining firm Canaan. Currently, most bitcoin mining ASICs run on 5nm chips, however, no company has made their ASIC chip designs open source.
ASIC stands for “application-specific integrated circuit” (ASIC) and refers to a computerized device that is optimized to perform a computational function and is typically used for mining proof-of-work cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin. is used for.
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