Intel Corporation has plans to develop special hardware that will be used for Bitcoin mining.
The special hardware will be developed with a focus on helping out small time Bitcoin miners generate profits once again.
A United States Patent Application was filed back in September 2016 by Intel Corp to develop a Bitcoin mining hardware accelerator.
The application was released last month and provides a hint at what the technology giant is planning to develop.
UFD Tech
The patent application describes a chip that will implement a Bitcoin mining accelerator composed of a processor core and a hardware accelerator. The main purpose of the chip is Bitcoin mining, with two computational blocks and a message digest datapath. The result would be that this chip could theoretically reduce the energy needs for Bitcoin mining. This will make it a lot more profitable for small time bitcoin miners.
Bitmain Technologies Ltd is the number one leader when it comes to bitcoin mining. The company is based in Beijing, China and takes advantage of the cheap electricity available in China. Bitmain has maintained its top position in the industry by operating the world's largest Bitcoin mining pools, combined with manufacturing its own hardware. This approach has allowed the company to generate around $4 billion in profits in 2017.
Intel Set To Compete With Bitmain
Now that Intel has made plans to move into Bitcoin mining hardware, there will be a lot of competition for Bitmain in the future. The Bitcoin mining hardware accelerator was just part of the patent. Intel also claims to have developed a way to reduce the space and power consumption of Bitcoin mining hardware.
Bitcoin mining operations currently consume too much energy and this can cut into profits as the price of Bitcoin has continued to decline in 2018. Smaller profit margins have forced a lot of the small-time Bitcoin mining operators to quit the market which has helped Bitmain and other large operators get a bigger piece of the market.
However, Intel's new tech can potentially make small-time mining profitable again. This will allow the industry to have a chance to be more distributed and less under the control of current mining giants.
In a statement, Randy Copeland, president of Velocity Micro said
Once this new Intel technology comes to market, ultimately more people will mine again because it's profitable again, driving down the market value of the coins, and finding a new market balance that will again put locations with lower electricity costs back at the advantage