It’s official, Intel is part of the bitcoin mining business. The gargantuan technology company announced its “ultra-low-voltage energy-efficient” ASIC chip barely six months ago, and it’s already here. Under normal circumstances, infrastructural support from a multinational company like Intel would be tremendous for the bitcoin market. How will it react in the middle of all this chaos? Will it react at all? The news didn’t immediately do much, but the long-term effect remains to be seen.

Intel AXG Custom Compute team is now shipping the Blockscale ASIC! First product will always be unforgettable, congratulations team
Excited to see how @ArgoBlockchain @griid and @HiveBlockchain improvise around Blockscale and our open design. pic.twitter.com/0rxtNTLMfw

— Raja Koduri (Bali Makaradhwaja) (@RajaXg) June 29, 2022

Raja Koduri, Intel’s Architecture, Graphics and Software (IAGS) division’s senior vice president, recently tweeted: 

“Intel AXG Custom Compute team is now shipping the Blockscale ASIC! First product will always be unforgettable, congratulations team. Excited to see how Argo, Griid and Hive improvise around Blockscale and our open design.”

Notably absent from the list is BLOCK, Jack Dorsey’s company. Does that mean something or is BLOCK just fourth on the list? Three months ago, Bitcoinist quoted Raja Koduri emphatically saying:

“Our blockchain accelerator will ship later this year. We are engaged directly with customers that share our sustainability goals. Argo Blockchain, BLOCK (formerly known as Square) and GRIID Infrastructure are among our first customers for this upcoming product.”

The Bitcoin Miners React To Intel’s Announcement

Green mining company Hive was the first to react, they tweeted “HIVE is proud to have partnered with Intel, and we can’t wait to put the new ASICs to good use mining BTC!” A few months ago, the company was much more eloquent in a press release NewsBTC quoted. “These miners are expected to be delivered over a period of one year starting in the second half of calendar 2022, the effect of which, if they are all installed, would be an expected increase of up to 95% in our aggregate Bitcoin mining hashrate from 1.9 Exahash per second.”

$HIVE is proud to have partnered with @intel, and we can’t wait to put the new ASICs to good use mining $BTC! https://t.co/qDWKnU95MI

— H I V E (@HiveBlockchain) June 29, 2022

For their part, Argo also went the simple route and tweeted. “Thanks, Raja Koduri and Intel. We’re excited to be innovating with these new ASIC chips in our custom immersion mining rigs. Our thanks to ePIC Blockchain for joining us on the ride.” That new player, ePIC Blockchain Technologies produces self-proclaimed “North American Designed ASIC RIGs.” So, innovation and customization are on the way.

Thanks, @RajaXg and @intel. We’re excited to be innovating with these new ASIC chips in our custom immersion mining rigs. Our thanks to @ePICBlockchain for joining us on the ride. https://t.co/pKlxDjkm08

— Argo (@ArgoBlockchain) June 29, 2022

Last but not least, let’s remember Raja Koduri’s words when Intel’s bitcoin mining experiment started: 

“Today, we at Intel are declaring our intent to contribute to the development of blockchain technologies, with a roadmap of energy-efficient accelerators. Intel will engage and promote an open and secure blockchain ecosystem and will help advance this technology in a responsible and sustainable way.”  

Remember that statement as we pass to the next section.

BTC price chart for 07/04/2022 on Bitfinex | Source: BTC/USD on TradingView.com

Mainstream Media Mocks Intel

In the eyes of mainstream media, bitcoin or anything related to it can’t do anything right. And this bear-market-of-sorts we’re into gives them the perfect ammunition to attack the technology and the billion-dollar market around it. Luckily, bitcoin doesn’t care. In the first mainstream article about Intel shipping its Blockscale ASIC chips ahead of time, The Register starts with valuable information:

“Blockscale is shipping a couple days ahead of Intel’s previously stated release window for the third quarter, which begins Friday. Even if it’s a tiny head start, it is nonetheless an achievement for a corporation that is becoming notoriously under-schedule across multiple products, including the Sapphire Rapids server chips and the discrete Arc GPUs.”

Only to then, start dunking on bitcoiners and Intel alike. They start with this:

“Experts and company officials are warning that the world of blockchain-fueled digital currencies is entering a crypto winter, a period where the value of virtual coins plunge and remain low. This last happened between early 2018 and mid-2020.”

And then, they dedicate 1000 words to the market’s condition instead of discussing Intel’s SEG energy-efficient intentions. Or the perfectly executed roll-out strategy that the company exhibited these last few months. Or the fact that bitcoin is humanity’s only hope.

Featured Image: Blockscale promotional image from this tweet | Charts by TradingView

This fascinating experiment involving free BTC generated concrete results and we’re here to review them. The feel-good story arrives courtesy of CNBC, who interviewed some of the protagonists and got to the bottom of things. It all started with 19-years-old Jeremy Rubin, who developed a program called Tidbit. It  allowed “users to mine for Bitcoins on a client’s computer as a replacement for traditional advertising.” The authorities weren’t so keen on his idea, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation remembers:

In December 2013, the New Jersey Attorney General’s office issued a sweeping subpoena to Rubin and Tidbit, seeking Tidbit’s source code, documents and narrative responses about how Tidbit worked, which websites it was installed on and the Bitcoin accounts and wallet addresses associated with Tidbit.

Related Reading | MIT BTC Project Goes Live, Offer $100 of Free BTC to Undergrads at MIT

They eventually dropped the investigation, but one good thing came out of it. He realized that even though he thought “everyone was super cutting-edge” at MIT, not many were familiar with Bitcoin. So, logically, he raised “half a million dollars in donations from alumni and bitcoin enthusiasts” and the free BTC experiment was born. 

Were There Conditions To Get The Free BTC?

The idea was for undergrad students to “complete a few questionnaires and review educational materials,” and to “set up their own crypto wallet, which at the time was hard enough to discourage participation.” Still, 3,108 students got $100 of free BTC. At the time, Bitcoin’s price was $336, so they got about 0,3 BTC each. At today’s price, that would be worth about $13.500. 

“We wanted to get bitcoin out in the world more, and we wanted to spread the technology,” said Rubin. “We also wanted to study what it means to distribute a new asset.”

How Many Sold Or Spent The BTC?

Luckily for the history books, researchers traced the project. Apparently, “1 in 10 cashed out in the first two weeks. By the end of the experiment in 2017, 1 in 4 had cashed out.” Paper hands, sure, but remember that no one had any idea if Bitcoin as a whole was going to pan out. CNBC quotes Christian Catalini, one of the researchers:

“Even at the time, the technology was quite user unfriendly,” he said. “Even within a pretty tech-savvy community such as MIT, it was kind of surprising to see how much work it really was to use bitcoin at the time.”

Still, 3 out of every 4 held on to the BTC, which is pretty impressive. “What was fascinating is that in a sense, the MIT students got it right. The vast majority held on to their bitcoin as an investment.” Did they, though? Or was it so difficult to use and unknown by vendors that they didn’t even bother? 

BTC price chart for 08/18/2021 on Bitstamp | Source: BTC/USD on TradingView.com

What Did The Students Do With Their Free BTC?

Well, long story short, they spent the free BTC on sushi. CNBC managed to track two of those students that, somewhat ironically, now work in the crypto space. One, Sam Trabucco, serves as Co-CEO of Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research. The other, “Van Phu, now a software engineer and co-founder of crypto broker Floating Point Group.” 

“One of the worst things and one of the best things at MIT is this restaurant called Thelonious Monkfish,” said Phu. “I spent a lot of my crypto buying sushi.”

Related Reading | Uniswap Labs Limits Access To Certain Tokens, What It Could Mean For The DeFi Sector

So did Trabucco, who remembers the experiment as an important experience for the people involved. He spent the free BTC because he “didn’t really think it was going to be the future of finance.” Still, he considers that maybe already having a Bitcoin wallet set up might’ve sent him on the path to head a firm as big as Alameda Research.

All’s well that ends well.

Featured Image by Yuhan Du on Unsplash - Charts by TradingView