Block also revealed plans to expand the scope of its mining project to include systems design.
“We spent a lot of time speaking with a wide variety of bitcoin miners to identify the challenges mining operators face,” Block writes. “Building on this knowledge and in line with our goal of supporting mining decentralization, we plan to offer both a standalone mining chip as well as a complete mining system of our own design.”
Democratizing access to bitcoin mining – the process of creating new bitcoins by solving increasingly complex computing problems – is a big part of this project’s mission statement.
“Mining is not accessible to everyone,” Dorsey wrote when Block first began building mining hardware in 2021. “Mining Bitcoin should be as easy as plugging in a platform to a power source. There are not enough incentives today for individuals to overcome the complexity of running a miner on their own.”
Indeed, members of the Bitcoin community have long feared that hardware vulnerabilities could compromise the stability of the network. The ASIC chip used in mining rigs, for example, is made in China, a country that has proven hostile to the crypto industry in recent years.
Block said in its note on Tuesday that the goal of this project was to both decentralize the supply of Bitcoin mining hardware and the distribution of hashrate – an indicator of industry competition and mining difficulties.
To this end, the fintech company overcomes a major barrier to entry: mining rigs are hard to find and expensive, and delivery can be unpredictable.
The company did not elaborate on the details of this latest announcement, but Dorsey released in 2021 that the company was considering a “custom silicon-based bitcoin mining system.” At the time, Dorsey went on to share his thoughts on the need to focus more on vertical integration, as well as silicon design, which he said is too concentrated among a few companies.
Block’s general manager of hardware, Thomas Templeton, previously revealed plans to improve the reliability and user experience of mining, addressing common issues related to heat dissipation and noise production.
This announcement comes just after the latest Bitcoin halving, which took effect Friday evening. The event occurs approximately every four years and halves the issuance of new bitcoins.
The idea of making the mining process more accessible is not limited to simply generating new bitcoins. Instead, Dorsey sees a long-term need for a fully decentralized, permissionless future.
“Mining needs to be more distributed,” Dorsey said on X in October, when he first floated the idea. “The more decentralized it is, the more resilient the Bitcoin network becomes.”
To this end, Block’s venture capital arm has backed Gridless, a company that operates bitcoin mines using renewable energy sources in Kenya, Malawi and Zambia.
