Block, the payments firm founded by Jack Dorsey, is developing a mechanism for bitcoin miners

<p>Block (previously Square), Jack Dorsey's payments startup, will begin mining for bitcoin.</p> <p>Block's general manager for hardware, Thomas Templeton, outlined the company's next actions in a series of tweets.</p> <p>According to Templeton, the goal is to make bitcoin mining — the process of creating new bitcoins by solving increasingly complicated computational tasks — more dispersed and efficient in every way, "from buying, to setting up, to maintenance, to mining."</p> <p>According to Templeton, making the mining process more accessible is about more than just creating more bitcoin. Instead, he claims that the corporation sees it as a long-term requirement for a future that is truly decentralised and permissionless.</p> <p>"Mining has to be more spread," Dorsey said in a tweet in October, when he originally proposed the notion. "The more decentralised something is, the more resilient the bitcoin network becomes."</p> <p>To that purpose, the business is addressing one key obstacle to entry: mining equipment are difficult to acquire, expensive, and delivery can be uncertain. Block claims it is open to developing a new ASIC, which is the specialised equipment used to mine bitcoin.</p> <p>The project is being incubated within Block's hardware team, which is assembling a core engineering team of system, ASIC, and software designers lead by Afshin Rezayee.</p> <p>In terms of hardware, Dorsey recently stated that the business was considering a "bitcoin mining system built on proprietary silicon." Dorsey went on to discuss the need for a greater emphasis on vertical integration as well as silicon design, which he believes is too concentrated in the hands of a few corporations.</p> <p>According to Templeton, Block is also working to improve mining reliability and user experience.</p> <p>"The most common difficulties we've heard with current systems are heat dissipation and dust." They also become non-functional virtually every day, necessitating a time-consuming reboot. "We want to design something that j