Jack Dorsey’s payments company, Block, is building a system for bitcoin miners

Jack Dorsey’s payments company, Block, is building a system for bitcoin miners

Jack Dorsey's payments company (formerly Square) is going to start mining for bitcoin. In a string of tweets, Block's general manager for hardware, Thomas Templeton, laid out the company's plans for next steps. Templeton says the goal is to make bitcoin mining — the process of creating new bitcoins by solving increasingly complex computational problems — more distributed and efficient in every way, "from buying, to set up, to maintenance, to mining." The idea of making the mining process more accessible has to do with more than just creating new bitcoin, according to Templeton. Instead, he says the company sees it as a long-term need for a future that is fully decentralized and permissionless. "Mining needs to be more distributed," Dorsey wrote in a tweet in October, . "The more decentralized this is, the more resilient the bitcoin network becomes." Toward that end, the company is solving one major barrier to entry: Mining rigs are hard to find, expensive, and delivery can be unpredictable. Block says it is open to making a new ASIC, which is the specialized gear use to mine for bitcoin. The project is being incubated within Block's hardware team, which is beginning to build out a