Last year we saw a lot of big companies getting involved with cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. Big names like Tesla, Nike, Adidas and Walmart have all joined the revolution of digital currencies, but recently yet another big company has decided to dip their toes in the crypto waters.

Tech giant Intel, according to reports, is currently focussed on creating an energy-efficient Bitcoin miner.

Mining Bitcoins is generally an energy-intensive process of creating new Bitcoins by solving extremely complicated math problems to verify transactions on the blockchain. These problems aren‘t solved by hand, but rather by sophisticated hardware carrying a huge amount of computing power.

Being the first to solve such a problem will reward you with 6.25 BTC as of today (January 20, 2022), but this amount will halve with every Bitcoin halving, an event which takes place roughly every four years. Anyway, 6.25 BTC is something most people would be very eager to get their hands on, so as a result the market for Bitcoin mining is very saturated.

Bitcoin mining used to be relatively cheap back when almost nobody did it, but since Bitcoin skyrocketed the past few years, mining started to be increasingly more interesting. Nowadays a simple desktop computer isn‘t going to cut it. The reason for that? Simply put: more computing power means a higher chance of being the first to solve the necessary math problem.

In the present climate you‘d need hundreds or thousands of computers solely dedicated to mining in order to stand a chance against the competition. So you can probably imagine now that Bitcoin mining has a large negative environmental impact. Intel wants to (partly) solve this problem with an energy-efficient Bitcoin miner, according to Tom‘s Hardware.

Intel will attend the ISSCC conference and present their “Bonanza Mine”, an ultra-low-voltage energy-efficient Bitcoin mining ASIC.

Ultimately, Bitcoin miners will always want to possess the most energy-efficient miners, because it would result in more profit for them, meaning that the mining market will always move into the direction of a greener economy.

Bitcoin mining may still be energy intensive, but so is the banking system, which clearly has fewer incentives to go "green." Cryptocurrencies threaten to give the monetary system as we know it a major refresh, and that‘s not going unnoticed. Intel, too, will soon be joining the now large line of companies getting involved in crypto.