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Huh. Here we have the largest, most important chipmaker in the US making and selling chips specifically for Bitcoin transaction processing (AKA "mining"). I wa

by cs702 5y ago

Huh. Here we have the largest, most important chipmaker in the US making and selling chips specifically for Bitcoin transaction processing (AKA "mining"). I was not expecting to see something like this, from a company like Intel, anytime soon. This sort of thing makes me think Bitcoin is on track to become a permanent component of the world's financial infrastructure, regardless of what I or anyone else thinks about it, because any efforts to outlaw it or regulate it out of existence will now hurt, not just tiny startups and offshore operators, but also leading companies like Intel, which is of strategic importance to the US. Most politicians in the US will be very reluctant to mess with a fast-growing, potentially large market for US technology products and financial services.

danuker 5y ago
> I was not expecting to see something like this On one hand, it shows Intel believes mining is here to stay. On the other hand, I suspect it makes up a very small part of their business, and any regulation won't hurt much.
- cs702 5y ago
  Think of it this way: Intel just validated the market for every Fortune 500 corporation.
belltaco 5y ago
>Bitcoin transaction processing (AKA "mining") Unfortunately, mining isn't scaled with processing transactions. Bitcoin has a hard cap of 7 transactions per second, regardless of whether 5 miners are running or 5 million. The amount of resources that are put into mining scale with the price of BTC, not transactions. Also Nvidia has made mining-only silicon for several years now. So Intel isn't the first major company doing it.