This Tech Billionaire Is Digging for Digital Gold—and He Forgot His Pickaxe 🤔⛏️

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In the small, dimly lit rooms of Block (formerly called Square), men spoke in whispers of revolution—not the bloody sort, but the kind promised by technology and expensive neck scarves. Jack Dorsey, brooding CEO, now sports a beard worthy of exile in Siberia and a gaze accustomed to disappointment.

A new invention was coming, a mining chip named “Proto”—a fine Greek word, suggesting dreams of progress and inevitable disappointment—set to launch in the far-off year 2025, just after the apocalypse, but before lunch. With a budget somewhere between $3 and $6 billion (give or take the cost of a Dostoevsky novel), Dorsey assured the world that this would tip the scales in a mining industry otherwise dominated by Bitmain, MicroBT, Canaan, and men with pockets deeper than the Volga.

“We are building this entirely in the United States,” Dorsey said with an air of tragic optimism, as if invoking the spirit of railroads and lost fortunes. He made it sound so easy—avoiding tariffs, ignoring wars, and outwitting the ghosts of macroeconomics past, present, and future.

Vendors and manufacturers, those shadowy, faceless figures who populate the margins of American innovation, have supposedly grown close to Dorsey. Perhaps they meet at midnight, in cafes, drinking bad coffee and dreaming, as Chekhov’s characters do, of a better life and an open-source future.

The American-made Proto was more than a mining chip, so they claimed—it was a clarion call, an open-source dream. In theory, developers and miners all over the world could look upon the blueprints, critique them, and cobble together their own inventions. In practice, perhaps most would simply complain about the coffee and reminisce about the tsar.

“This is a completely open-source initiative…” Dorsey declared, while somewhere, a developer sighed, and another wrote a one-star review. Feedback would be accepted, improvements made, and the world of Bitcoin mining might finally be as lively as a provincial Russian town—with slightly more electricity and fewer samovars.

Why this rush into hardware? The answer, like most things in life, was money—or, more specifically, the search for it. Block’s first quarter brought in a not-insignificant $2.29 billion in gross profit, though the mood around the table was more “borrowed rubles” than “champagne and caviar.” Cash App and Square did their best, but not even the most optimistic could ignore the sinking feeling, as the figures, like a melodramatic aunt, fainted before expectations.

And then the markets, with their usual delicacy, dropped Block’s stock by 21%. The company’s profit forecast was adjusted as tenderly as a doctor breaks bad news, now only 12%—a number that loomed as large as a Chekhovian winter.

Adding insult to injury and irony to injury, Block’s own bitcoin stashes had lost their shine—a $93.4 million unrealized loss, where last quarter offered only smiles and $233.4 million cheer. Even Bitcoin trading revenue decided it was time for a sabbatical, dropping by 15.7%, no doubt stopping off at Yalta for its health.

And yet Dorsey, like any good character in search of meaning or another investment round, refused to abandon hope. Proto, he insisted, was the way forward. Perhaps it was. Or perhaps, as with all things in business and Russian literature, we’ll look back on these efforts and ask, with a shrug and a tune played badly on the balalaika: what if we’d stayed content making coffee?

Until then, Proto marches forward—a beacon for developers, miners, and anyone who’s ever yearned for something open-source to fill the emptiness. But beware: in Block’s world, as in life, the real mining is for meaning… and not everyone strikes gold.

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2025-05-03 10:45