Deep tech may stumble on insufficient computing power

It appears that many of the “deep tech” algorithms the world is excited about will run into physical barriers before they reach their true promise. Take Bitcoin. A cryptocurrency based on blockchain technology, it has a sophisticated algorithm that grows in complexity, as very few new Bitcoin are minted—through a digital process called “mining”. For a simple description of Bitcoin and blockchain, you could refer to an earlier Mint column of mine.

Bitcoin’s assurance of validity is achieved by its “proving” algorithm, which is designed to continually increase in mathematical complexity—and hence the computing power needed to process it—every time a Bitcoin is mined. Individual miners are continually doing work to assess the validity of each Bitcoin transaction and confirm whether it adheres to the cryptocurrency’s rules. They earn small amounts of new Bitcoin for their efforts. The complexity of getting several miners to agree on the same history of transactions (and thereby validate them) is managed by the same miners who try outpacing one another to create a valid “block”.