Block Inc., the payments company formerly known as Square, is building a bitcoin mining system and is hiring a team for the effort, an executive said Thursday.
“We want to make mining more distributed and efficient in every way, from procurement to installation, maintenance, mining,” Thomas Templeton, the company’s general manager for hardware, said on Twitter. “We are interested because mining goes far beyond creating the new bitcoin. We see this as a long-term need for a future that is completely decentralized and permissionless.”
Templeton said mining will take place “in the open and with the community” – a vision Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey announced in October. The team will aim to solve mining equipment, power consumption and reliability problems. The equipment, as well as the noise it generates, eventually Block wants it to be possible for anyone to mine bitcoin from home.
The effort is in line with Dorsey’s belief that bitcoin could be the dominant cryptocurrency of the internet. The CEO, who left his second job at Twitter at the end of November, believes the cryptocurrency will help change the way money moves around the world. Block, which lets users buy and sell bitcoin through its Cash app, is also building a physical bitcoin wallet, and bought $170 million worth of cryptocurrency last February to keep on its balance sheet.
This story has been published without modification in text from a wire agency feed. Only the title has been changed.
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