Remember Intel’s run at Bitcoin mining? In the span of a year that saw monkey JPEGs selling for six figures and Ethereum setting fire to GPUs, Intel quietly entered and exited the blockchain game. Its Blockcsale chips promised a clean, power-efficient future for Bitcoin mining. Then they vanished.
Now, those same chips are back. On September 2, nonprofit hardware collective 256 Foundation tweeted that it had received a delivery of 256,000 Intel BZM2 ASICs from Proto, the mining arm of Jack Dorsey’s Block, Inc., which previously pledged to offload leftover chips from its partnership with Intel. We spoke with the nonprofit for more details.
