Jack Dorsey has announced the Completion Prototype design of his New five-nanometre Bitcoin

The five-nanometer (5nm) Bitcoin mining chip, which Block, the financial services and technology startup controlled by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, argues is essential to decentralizing the supply of Bitcoin mining rigs, has reached prototype completion.

Block noted that creating Bitcoin mining ASIC rigs is technically and financially difficult in a blog post published on April 28.

This has led to “the excessive concentration of custom bitcoin mining silicon” in the possession of a few businesses. According to Block, this centralization could be better for miners and the entire Bitcoin network.

We have an update on our mining initiative. This one is about ASICshttps://t.co/bJOM9YNxfl

— Thomas Templeton (@TempletonThomas) April 28, 2023

 

Notably, the San Francisco-based business stated that it intends to sell standalone ASICs and other hardware parts to “optimize innovation and maximize the size of the Bitcoin mining hardware ecosystem” and make Bitcoin mining technology “open source” wherever possible.

The post continues that the actions performed over the previous few months will enable the company to test out new concepts and help them offer Bitcoin mining chips that are more effective and affordable. Block said that Intel’s sizable batch of ASIC chips had been purchased to expedite this development effort.

As part of cost-cutting initiatives, Intel said on April 18 that it would stop accepting new orders for its Blockscale 1000 Series ASICs by October 20 and finish deliveries in April 2024.

According to Block, Intel’s significant purchase of ASICs would hasten the development of its proprietary 3nm processor, which it promises will be the most cutting-edge semiconductor to date when it is released.

 

“We can now focus our design team exclusively on cutting edge three nanometer ASIC development.”

 

The breadth of two silicon atoms is roughly similar to the scale of a nanometer (1nm). More transistors can fit into a silicon die of the same size as components of the circuits get smaller.

Reducing the overall size improves overall efficiency and decreases the heat produced since the electric current must travel a shorter distance through the course to complete a calculation.

It’s important to remember that 5 nanometer ASIC processors have been available for a while; the first 5nm ASIC was introduced in 2021 by the Chinese mining company Canaan.

The majority of 5nm chips used in Bitcoin mining ASICs currently exist, but business still needs to release the blueprints of their ASIC chips as open source.

                     Bitmain S19 ASIC mining rig. Source: Bitmain.

 

“ASIC” stands for “application-specific integrated circuit” and describes a computerized device explicitly designed to carry out a single computational task. ASICs are frequently used to mine proof-of-work cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.