Intel Will Present Its Low-Voltage BTC Mining Chips Soon

Intel will present its low-voltage BTC mining chips soon but the bigger question is whether this will solve the energy consumption problem of the proof of work mining? Let’s find out today in our Bitcoin latest news.

Intel will present its low-voltage BTC mining chips next month dubbed “Bonanza Mine” chip that will provide energy-efficient BTC mining. At present, little is known about the chip or about the plans for it. The details about the chip emerged from the International Solid-State Circuits Conference program schedule. The ISSCC program is an industry-specific event that runs for eight days in February. Page 27 of the program shows a presentation of the Bonanza Mine Chip but no further information is available at this time.

The ultra-low voltage energy efficient ASIC could revolutionize the mining industry but in the long run,e it could make the competitive industry even more competitive. Critics say that BTC mining is reliant on fossil fuels which makes the mining process environmentally damaging but other reports say that the network runs on 75% renewable energy which makes the previous argument invalid. Either way, it cannot be disputed that bitcoin’s electricity usage is high. The Bitcoin hash rate grew so much and with it the electricity consumption.

Just recently we saw that the EU Securities and Markets Authority vice-chair Erik Thedeen called for a ban on proof of work mining because it is a national issue in his country in Sweden. In conjunction with the ban, he recommended encouraging less energy-intensive PoS mining. So can this new chip by Intel bring that?

The average cost to mine a BTC comes at around $7000 to $11,000 and it is highly profitable to mine the price of $41,500. The mining entities compete by utilizing the best ASIC equipment so teh higher the equipment’s hashing power, the more it tries to guess the hash target right, and win the block reward. This led to increasingly powerful and expensive miners to get develop to the point that BTC mining is reserved for major corporations. The specs of Intel’s Bonanza chip are not known yet but being with low energy, the miners could benefit from the low electricity costs and the consumption argument that can be put by environmentalists would carry less weight.

In the long term, the low electricity mining costs might not make any difference. One miner even said that the miners could produce more hashes and will bring zero net benefits regardless of the costs

“It is part of the core design of Bitcoin (and other proof-of-work cryptos) that the inefficiency of the network itself is what secures the network. If you make it cheaper in power to calculate a hash to try to win a Bitcoin reward, the miners will just calculate more hashes to compete. No net benefit (from an energy standpoint).”