Samsung has officially confirmed their entry into the cryptocurrency mining business and is developing its own crypto-mining chips.
“Samsung’s foundry business is currently engaged in the manufacturing of cryptocurrency mining chips. However, we are unable to disclose further details regarding our customers,” – Samsung official
Crypto-mining businesses are usually profitable but require powerful computers. Samsung is one of the largest chip-makers in the world and it was expected to start manufacturing mining chips as well.
This could make Samsung a difficult rival for the existing mining chips developers such as the Chinese companies Bitmain and Canaan. Their chips are called application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs – hardware which is designed specifically to carry out a certain task, in this case, to mine cryptocurreny, including Bitcoin.
Crypto-mining
Earlier, the process of crypto-mining was less complicated and could be done by almost any techie on his computer. These days, however, the process has become extremely resource intensive and needs ASICs to be handled effectively.
In the process, several connected computers solve some math problems related to blockchain based transactions. This powers Bitcoin’s payment network while also giving the miner a small reward for the transaction. The cryptocurrency market is emerging day by day with new investors moving in, which has increased the time/resources required to mine cryptocurrency.
Companies such as Facebook are devising ways to make cryptocurrencies more practical and usable in the future and the technology is expected to improve further with time.
