In October of 2021 Jack announced: “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.”
Since then, Jack stepped down as the CEO of Twitter and has turned Square into Block. Committing Block to the mission of turning Bitcoin into the internet’s currency and making mining widely available for all.
Thomas Templeton from Block’s Bitcoin mining team announced that “we’re doing it… We want to make mining more distributed and efficient in every way, from buying, to set up, to maintenance, to mining. We’re interested because mining goes far beyond creating new bitcoin. We see it as a long-term need for a future that is fully decentralized and permissionless.”
In October we announced that we’re considering building a bitcoin mining system, out in the open & alongside the community, and we’ve decided…we’re doing it! We thought we’d share some more details on how our initial discussions are going and where we’re headed next. https://t.co/wURxEKBpJ5
We started by digging into two big questions. 1) What are customer pain points today? 2) What are the specific technical challenges? We spoke with members of the mining community to learn more about their experiences. Here’s what we’ve found so far:
2/ Reliability. Common issues we’ve heard with current systems are around heat dissipation and dust. They also become non-functional almost every day, which requires a time-consuming reboot. We want to build something that just works. What can we simplify to make this a reality?
Developing products is never a solo journey, and evaluating existing tech is always part of our practice. For this project, we started with evaluating various IP blocks (since we’re open to making a new ASIC), open-source miner firmware, and other system software offerings.
Team. We’re incubating this investigation within Block’s hardware team and are starting to build out a core engineering team of system, asic, and software designers led by @afshinrezayee. A few of the open roles are Electrical Engineers, Analog Designers, and Layout Engineers.
Thanks for engaging with our work. If you have questions, want to share more feedback about the pain points or missing features of the existing mining solutions, or know someone we should be talking to about our open roles, you can reach us at miningsystem (at) block (dot) xyz