Dorsey’s Block Officially Building an Open Bitcoin Mining System

Jack Dorsey’s fintech firm, Block, formerly called Square is now officially carrying out its plan to build a Bitcoin (BTC) mining system.

The general manager for hardware at the company, Thomas Templeton revealed the move via a tweet on Thursday.

The tweet was a reply to Dorsey’s Twitter post on the company’s plan to build a Bitcoin mining system back in October last year.

“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,” Templeton tweeted.

Dorsey confirmed Templeton’s announcement in a tweet:

“We’re officially building an open bitcoin mining system.”

Templeton noted that the reason for the project is to solve the pre-existing Bitcoin mining computational issues by making it more distributed and efficient in every way, from buying to setting up, to maintenance.

Furthermore, he stated that Block reached out to the mining community to learn more about their mining experience and after doing so and hearing from them, they will now be working on these three areas: availability, reliability, and performance.

Following the announcement of the mining project, Templeton noted that the company is now evaluating various IP blocks since it’s open to making new Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) chips, open-source miner firmware, and other system software offerings.

Block is currently carrying out the project with the company’s hardware team and is starting to develop a core engineering team and software designers headed by Afshin Rezayee.

Strong Support for Bitcoin

This new development does not come as a surprise to the crypto community as Block’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, is a Bitcoin advocate.

He has always had strong support for the leading cryptocurrency over the years, Dorsey loves Bitcoin and has previously said there is nothing more to work on in a lifetime than BTC.

Since he launched Block in 2009, the company has invested over $200 million in BTC.

Just a few days ago, Coinfomania reported that Dorsey has created a nonprofit group, dubbed “Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund,” to assist developers of the leading cryptocurrency facing legal issues.