This is some great research, the paper is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-59675-5.pdf and there are two things that stand out in it, the first is that they used a "commercial graphene transistor" and the second is that their apparatus didn't need to be super-cooled or under tens of atmospheres of pressure or in vacuum etc. For me, that means that the risks of bringing this into an actual thing are much less than they have been for other technologies (like Josephson-Junctions).
It's also kind of funny that you could mine the shit out of Bitcoin with something like this, which would either pay for itself or crash Bitcoin, hard to predict.
Someone · 11h ago
> It's also kind of funny that you could mine the shit out of Bitcoin with something like this, which would either pay for itself or crash Bitcoin, hard to predict.
Bitcoin has a built-in mechanism to counteract improvements in hashing speed (either because of hardware getting faster, algorithmic improvements, or more hardware getting devoted to hashing).
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#Mining: “The difficulty of generating a block is deterministically adjusted based on the mining power on the network by changing the difficulty target, which is recalibrated every 2,016 blocks (approximately two weeks) to maintain an average time of ten minutes between new blocks“
I think there’s more than enough range available here to handle a million-fold increase in hashing power.
inhumantsar · 10h ago
2016 blocks is a lot though. that's nearly $700 million in mining fees.
if someone had a monopoly on chips like these, they could dominate the network and freeze out other miners. which would likely tank the network and make those BTC worthless
Someone · 1h ago
That is a risk but not a new risk. It existed with the transition to ASIC miners, too, and didn’t happen.
I guess that didn’t happen because making ASICs is relatively easy, but even if it isn’t, what would be in it for a potential monopolist to tank the value of bitcoin in that way? They better take a large but not overly large part of the market and keep mining money for a long time, only speeding up when a competitor steps in.
It's also kind of funny that you could mine the shit out of Bitcoin with something like this, which would either pay for itself or crash Bitcoin, hard to predict.
Bitcoin has a built-in mechanism to counteract improvements in hashing speed (either because of hardware getting faster, algorithmic improvements, or more hardware getting devoted to hashing).
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#Mining: “The difficulty of generating a block is deterministically adjusted based on the mining power on the network by changing the difficulty target, which is recalibrated every 2,016 blocks (approximately two weeks) to maintain an average time of ten minutes between new blocks“
I think there’s more than enough range available here to handle a million-fold increase in hashing power.
if someone had a monopoly on chips like these, they could dominate the network and freeze out other miners. which would likely tank the network and make those BTC worthless
I guess that didn’t happen because making ASICs is relatively easy, but even if it isn’t, what would be in it for a potential monopolist to tank the value of bitcoin in that way? They better take a large but not overly large part of the market and keep mining money for a long time, only speeding up when a competitor steps in.