Jack Dorsey‘s payments company Block (formerly Square) will start bitcoin mining soon.
In a series of tweets, Block’s general manager of hardware, Thomas Templeton, laid out the company’s next steps. According to Templeton, the idea of making the mining process more accessible goes beyond just creating new bitcoins. Instead, he said the company sees this as a long-term need for a fully decentralized and less permissioned future.
To that end, the company is addressing a major barrier to entry: Miners are hard to find, expensive, and delivery can be unpredictable. Block said it was open to building new ASICs, specialized equipment used to mine bitcoin.
The project is incubating in Block’s hardware team, which is starting to form a core engineering team of system, ASIC and software designers led by Afshin Rezayee.
On the hardware front, Dorsey previously tweeted that the company is considering a “custom chip-based bitcoin mining system.” Dorsey went on to share his thoughts that more attention needs to be paid to vertical integration as well as chip design, which he said is too concentrated in a few companies.
Block also wants to improve the reliability and user experience of mining, Templeton wrote. On the hardware front, Dorsey previously tweeted that the company is considering a “custom chip-based bitcoin mining system.” Dorsey went on to share his thoughts that more attention needs to be paid to vertical integration as well as chip design, which he said is too concentrated in a few companies.
