Financial technology company Block Inc. has announced a revolutionary new mining system designed to significantly extend the lifespan of Bitcoin rigs, lowering operational costs for miners. The announcement focuses on Proto Rig, a modular system replacing traditional three-to-five-year rig lifecycles with hardware built to last a decade or more. This new approach enables miners to simply swap out individual hashboards as technology improves, potentially cutting upgrade costs by up to 20% per cycle. The system was unveiled at Core Scientific’s Dalton, Georgia facility on Thursday. Block’s move builds upon their recent expansion into mining hardware, with the company developing a 3-nanometer Bitcoin mining chip in April 2024 and signing a supply agreement with Core Scientific later that year. Block’s focus on durability comes as Bitcoin mining remains a capital-intensive industry. Professional-grade rigs often cost more than $10,000 (excluding electricity costs). While miners are currently producing over $50 million worth of Bitcoin daily, profitability ultimately depends on factors like electricity costs, mining difficulty and hardware efficiency. Companies like Core Scientific have successfully reoriented their infrastructure for other workloads, including high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence, while others are holding onto mined Bitcoin to capitalize on potential price increases. These efforts follow CoreWeave’s acquisition of Core Scientific in 2023 after the latter filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2022. The mining industry has seen a decline in the Bitcoin hashrate index, a measure of profitability. Hive Digital, another major miner, has also shifted resources to HPC and AI, with these revenue streams appearing on their income statement within a year. This shift underscores the evolving landscape of Bitcoin mining.