Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger just a few days ago raged against Bitcoin, calling it a “climate crisis.”
“A single ledger entry in Bitcoin consumes enough energy to power your house for almost a day. That’s a climate crisis. That’s not okay,” he told Bloomberg in an interview last week.
He was clearly hitting out at power-guzzling GPUs and similar chips necessary for Bitcoin mining, which requires country-size amounts of electricity as the US House Committee on Energy and Commerce heard last month.
But in under a minute in that same interview, Gelsinger – who is trying to foster an all-American farm boy at heart reputation, building in the “Silicon Heartland” in Ohio – abruptly changed his world-savior tone.
“Intel’s bringing forward a blockchain chip that’s dramatically better,” he said.
That chip, dubbed Bonanza Mine, was detailed this month at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference. This 7nm-node ASIC tries its best to minimize power consumption without cutting back on processing oomph in order to provide some degree of profitability for miners.
Bitcoin uses a blockchain to enable peer-to-peer transactions without the need of a central clearing house. Instead, the transactions are verified by validators, who are rewarded for solving complex computational problems known as proof of work that’s part of this verification process, said Vikram Suresh, a research scientist at Intel, in an online presentation. A transaction is added to Bitcoin’s distributed ledger once it has been validated. Validators are known as miners.
The proof-of-work…
