Mr. Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Square, said that the fintech firm is looking to build a Bitcoin mining system based on custom silicon and open source for individuals as well as businesses.
Last day, Mr. Dorsey tweeted that the company is considering a “Bitcoin mining system based on custom silicon and open source for individuals and businesses worldwide.” This would add to Square’s existing Bitcoin-focused projects including a business to build an open developer platform, as well as a hardware wallet for the cryptocurrency.
“If we do this, we’d follow our hardware wallet model: build in the open in collaboration with the community,” Mr. Dorsey said in a tweet.
Mr. Dorsey’s goal would be to make crypto mining, the process of creating new Bitcoins by solving increasingly complex computational problems, more accessible, similar to Square’s original vision which was to make it easier for small businesses and independent proprietors to take credit card payments.
The team run by Mr. Jesse Dorogusker, who is the hardware lead at Square, will begin analyzing the technology necessary to take this project on, according to Mr. Dorsey, who is also the CEO of Twitter.
“We 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,” Mr. Dorogusker tweeted.
Mr. Dorsey also said that silicon design or chip design is too concentrated in a few companies, leading to supply constraints. “Mining needs to be more distributed. The more decentralized this is, the more resilient the Bitcoin network becomes,” the Twitter CEO tweeted.
Last day, Bitcoin topped $60,000 for the first time in six months, as optimism grew that US regulators would allow a futures-based exchange-traded fund (ETF), a move likely to open the path to wider investment in digital assets.
