Dorsey's Payments Firm Block Starts to Begin Mining Bitcoin

Block Inc, formerly known as Square, will begin mining Bitcoin with its mining system based on custom silicon and open source for individuals and businesses worldwide.

Block's co-founder Jack Dorsey first suggested the idea on October 15, 2021, and said mining needs to be more distributed and more efficient.

Thomas Templeton, Block's general manager of hardware, explained Block's future plans for this in a series of Twitter posts and hopes to improve the reliability and user experience of mining, making the process of creating bitcoin "from buying, to set up, to maintenance, to mining” more efficient.

The project is incubating in Block's hardware team, which will work together with a core engineering team of system ASIC, and software designers led by Afshin Rezayee.

Templeton said the company is addressing major barriers to entry such as availability of miners, expensive and hard to find mining rigs, and unpredictable deliveries. The reliability of the miners are due to heat dissipation and dust and the machine can be unused every day which consumes a lot of time to restart and some mining rigs generate harmful harmonics in the grid and can generate a lot of noise at home.

Templeton tweeted that:

“All miners want lower power consumption and higher or 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.”

Last year, Block Inc released its third-quarter financial report, showing that the mobile payment application Cash App under Square achieved $1.82 billion in Bitcoin revenue.

In another news from two days ago, Block Inc made a formal argument at a Missouri federal court stating that its new name won't confuse potential customers with tax-preparation giant H&R Block who has filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against the financial-services company.

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