Key Takeaways:
- Jack Dorsey’s firm Block is all set to start mining for bitcoin.
- Tweets from block’s general manager for hardware,laid out the company goal for next steps.
- Block is also working on a wallet to store cryptocurrency.
Jack Dorsey, CEO of Block, on Thursday, announced that his digital payments firm Block is building a system to make it easier and reliable for people to mine Bitcoin. The tech evangelist on Twitter revealed that “We’re officially building an open bitcoin mining system”  The company first announced that it was considering the project in October.
The project’s goal is to make mining bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market value, “more distributed and efficient,” tweeted Thomas Templeton, the company’s general manager for hardware. There are a number of “customer pain points” and “technical challenges” in the mining community that Block hopes to address, including mining rig availability, high price, reliability and power consumption, he added further.
Hardware and software teams at Block will openly collaborate with the cryptocurrency community outside of the San Francisco-based company, aiming to create a mining system that could be used by anyone, according to Dorsey’s tweets.
Meanwhile in November 2020, Dorsey released the whitepaper of its decentralised Bitcoin exchange proposal.“In order to achieve this, the nature of financial institutions needs to evolve. We can either embrace this change — by investing in this future as a public good by rethinking our business models and ways to create value — or we can let this future happen to us,” the company wrote in a blog post.
Block changed its name from Square late last year to denote a broader mission that includes blockchain and economic empowerment. Block is also working on a wallet for storing cryptocurrency. Dorsey is a Bitcoin investor. His love for cryptocurrency dates back to 2017 when he started advocating Bitcoin as the king coin.
Bitcoin operates on a proof of work (PoW) model, where miners must compete to solve complex puzzles in order to validate transactions. Bitcoin is currently trading at around $42,598, according to Coin Metrics.
