It has been revealed, originally by The Bell and confirmed by Samsung to Techcrunch, that Samsung are making ultra-fast chips specifically for crypto-mining.
These ultra-fast chips are called ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuits) – chips that are designed for a specific use.
This is a strategic move by world's largest chip manufacturer, and could well position it as a major player in this market and provide some serious competition for Chinese companies Canaan Creative and Bitmain.
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New Bitcoins are created by "mining" them. Mining involves verifying Bitcoin transactions – which are digital payments from one user to another on a decentralized network.
Now verifying these transactions isn't straightforward and requires that computers solve a difficult mathematical problem.
In the beginning, anyone could mine Bitcoin using just their home computer or laptop using their CPU. But as time has gone on and Bitcoin has become more popular, miners have had to move onto faster hardware like GPUs as the mathematical problems have become increasingly more difficult to solve.
These days, miners are turning to ASICs because they can mine at unprecedented speeds while consuming much less power than FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Array) or GPU mining rigs.
It's not clear what product Samsung plans to create with these chips, but it has confirmed that it will be working with Taiwanese firm TSMC which supplies chips to companies that specialize in cryptocurrency mining.
And according to Quartz, selling these chips has proved very profitable. In fact it has added around $350 million to $400 million to TSMCs quarterly revenue!
This has got to be good news for cryptocurrency as a whole, which is really taking a hammering at the minute. I truly believe in the future of cryptocurrency, but not sure which one will win the race. The technology behind it however – the Blockchain - is here to say, and with a big player like Samsung getting involved, it really does add to the credibility of the whole thing.