Market News

(Bloomberg) -- Block Inc., the payments company formerly known as Square, is building a Bitcoin mining system and hiring a team for the effort, an executive said Thursday.

“We want to make mining more distributed and efficient in every way, from buying, to set up, to maintenance, to mining,” Thomas Templeton, the company’s general manager for hardware, said on Twitter. “We’re interested because mining goes far beyond creating new Bitcoin. We see it as a long-term need for a future that is fully decentralized and permissionless.”

The mining will occur “out in the open & alongside the community,” Templeton said -- a vision Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey announced in October. The team will aim to solve problems with access to mining equipment, the power consumption and reliability of the equipment, as well as the noise it generates. Ultimately, Block wants it to be possible for anyone to mine Bitcoin from home.

The effort aligns with Dorsey’s conviction that Bitcoin can be the internet’s dominant cryptocurrency. The CEO, who left his other job at Twitter in late November, believes the cryptocurrency will help change the way money moves around the world. Block, which lets users buy and sell Bitcoin through its Cash App, is also building a physical Bitcoin wallet, and bought $170 million worth of the cryptocurrency last February to keep on its balance sheet.