Apart from Elon Musk, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has been one of the strongest proponents of Bitcoin – in fact, Twitter recently enabled users to tip influencers with the popular cryptocurrency. This time, Dorsey has said that his financial services and digital payments company Square is looking to enter the Bitcoin mining sector and starting a “deep technical investigation” into the creation of an open-source Bitcoin mining system.
Square is considering building a Bitcoin mining system based on custom silicon and open source for individuals and businesses worldwide. If we do this, we’d follow our hardware wallet model: build in the open in collaboration with the community. First some thoughts and questions.
— jack⚡️ (@jack) October 15, 2021
This comes as Bitcoin is rising every day (it was recently recognized as legal tender in El Salvador) despite facing challenges in China. Its price soared over $62,000 and may soon exceed the record of $65,000.
According to Dorsey, Square is contemplating a “bitcoin mining system based on custom silicon and open source for individuals and businesses worldwide.” This system would make the process of mining Bitcoin much more accessible and simpler – currently. If the mining system successfully comes through, this would address the problems of accessibility and complexity in mining Bitcoin.
Dorsey feels that the process of mining Bitcoin should be as easy as plugging a rig into a power source and that is what he is striving to achieve. This would have a similar approach as the Bitcoin hardware wallet that Square had been working on, although the creation of such a system was comparatively more complex. According to Dorsey, the creation of custom chips was “very expensive” and would be new territory for Square.
“Mining needs to be more efficient,” Dorsey tweeted. “Driving towards clean and efficient energy use is great for Bitcoin’s economics, impact, and scalability. Energy is a system-level problem that requires innovation in silicon, software, and integration.” He added that it needed to be decentralized – the more decentralized this is, the more resilient the bitcoin network will become.
A team led by Hardware Lead at Square Jesse Dorogusker will start the investigation. Dorogusker said that they will incubate the bitcoin mining system project inside Square’s hardware team, starting with architecture, design, and prototyping of more efficient silicon, hashing algorithms, and power architectures.
