The nascent world of blockchain-powered virtual currencies keeps getting more irresistible with each passing day and many more firms are looking to have a piece of the ‘cryptocake.’ Intel Corp., the world’s largest manufacturer of personal computer microprocessors, has caught the bitcoin bug and is now awaiting approval for its cryptocurrency mining system-on-a-chip patent.

Intel Wants to Hodl

According to Investopedia, Intel has filed a patent that would enable it to manufacture high-grade chips that could make bitcoin mining faster, with very minimal power consumption.
The system-on-a-chip (SOC) comes with inbuilt hardware that fast-tracks the entire mining process.
On April 26, 2018, the 17 millionth bitcoin was successfully mined out of a total of 21 million. With this milestone reached, it means that mining the flagship cryptocurrency will keep getting more difficult, hence miners would need more sophisticated mining equipment and a substantial amount of electricity supply to remain in profit.
“It’s an event that makes the market more aware of the scarcity of bitcoin. It will eventually turn into higher prices,” Ansel Lindner, host of the Bitcoin & Markets podcast, remarked back in April.

Good Thinking

Intel has seen a significant opportunity in the whole scenario and has come up with an innovative idea that could help miners do more with less.
According to reports, the proposed system will come with an array of elements including a processor farm, logic device, and an integrated circuit. If all goes as planned, the system will function by limiting the search space needed to determine the next nonce required to solve the mining-related equation. However, if the problem persists then the highly functional chip will reshuffle the Merkle tree or the arrangement of unprocessed transactions. The above process is quite cumbersome for quite many systems currently being utilized by crypto miners. In essence, if the patent is approved, it will bring smiles to the faces of many.