By Nanome CEO Steve McCloskey

While attending college at UC San Diego, I studied nanoengineering and materials science. In 2012, I became enamored in cryptocurrency, and have been an active member of the industry ever since. I began working on virtual reality applications in 2014.

While studying as a student in the world’s first nanoengineering department, I realized how we need a three-dimensional design interface for all things nanoscale. The field is nanotechnology, and its why I founded Nanome, Inc.

Nanotechnology refers to the manipulation of matter on an atomic, molecular and supramolecular scale. One nanometer is one billionth of a meter. Nanotech generally refers to 1 to 100 nm as defined by the National Nanotechnology Initiative in the US, but there is some debate here. The smallest cellular life form — bacteria in the genus Mycoplasma — is approximately 200 nm in length. Viruses are even smaller.

Image Source: Bitminer.io

We spend a lot of time at Nanome on Matryx, our blockchain-based decentralized collaboration platform with a native crypto-token, ‘MTX’. As a nanotechnology-minded company, we have determined nanotechnology has implications for the future of cryptocurrency mining.

Nanotechnology has transformed and will continue to transform cryptocurrency mining — including ASIC and GPU miners for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other crypto currencies. (GPUs, in fact, power much of the artificial intelligence, Virtual Reality, and molecular simulation of today)

Fabbing cryptocurrency mining technology down to the nanotechnology level generates many opportunities, like the possibility of hardware mining and faster computers.

As things take up less energy, while producing more, we will see our technological environment evolve. I am confident new technologies will undermine the large scale farm mining model with which we are familiar today. These are essentially points of centralization in cryptocurrencies, but nanotechnology can increase distribution in computer networks.

Giga Watt mining facility in Wenatchee, Washington

In the future, instead of buying a new ASIC every year, there could be a baseline of optimized processors. We see Moore’s Law slowing down every year, and someday we will hit a plateau of traditional computing capabilities.

In this scenario, having a specific nanometer chip embedded into devices of all sorts — televisions, laptops, cell phones, etc. — becomes the de facto standard for mining not just Bitcoin, but a variety of other algorithms as well.

Interface and colloid science has given rise to breakthroughs such as graphene-based carbon nanotubes, other fullerenes, nanomaterials with fast ion transport, and various nanoparticles and nanorods. The Internet of Things will also to be furthered by advancements in Light Fidelity (Li-FI) networks, radio frequency identification (RFDI), and nano-antenna technology.

These might one day play a role in increasing computations per second, while decreasing the amount of power used in our appliances. This makes it increasingly possible that one day perhaps even toasters will be mining cryptocurrency or selling their unused computational power to other nodes on the network. We may live in a world where your toaster will pay off it’s gambling debt to your refrigerator by mining cryptocurrency.

Molecular Beam Epitaxy could allow for a “bottom up” approach to material assembly, in particular pertaining to semiconductor materials used in chip and computing applications, stacks, gating, and nanowire lasers. It is used in the manufacture of semiconductor devices, such as transistors, and is considered one of the foundational tools for the development of nanotechnologies.

Nanotechnology might also lead to programmable matter. That is, matter that can change physical properties, including shape, density, moduli, conductivity, optical properties and more. This could change the nature of chips.

With better chips dispersed throughout the IoT device fabric, computing resources become a global computational mesh network. We are seeing part of this today with Ethereum and its “planetary scale computation model.” (to borrow Nanome advisor Dr. Benjamin Bratton’s term)

An ASIC chip, which is used to mine bitcoins and various other cryptocurrencies, is a series of transistors designed to run only a specific piece of code such as the SHA-256 algorithm for mining Bitcoin. Such features will surely continue to be optimized by nanotechnology.

One day every token might have its own specific ASIC model where certain computational tasks may harvest resources from different ASICs in the network much like our brain uses specialized parts for us to process and interact with our world.

Steve McCloskey is an Alumni from the first class of the UC San Diego Nanoengineering department and is from North Hollywood, CA. Steve’s work is at the interface level from both a design approach on the human interface to digital technology and the biochemical interface to nanomaterials. During his time at UC San Diego Steve worked directly with the founding Chair of the Nanoengineering Department, Ken Vecchio helping set the foundation for the Nanoengineering Materials Research Center and developing thermodynamic processing methods for Iron-based Superelastic alloys. After graduating with a B.S. in Nanoengineering he enrolled in graduate courses at UCSD in Nanoengineering Materials Simulations and Human Interface Design. He founded Nanome Inc (previously Nano VR) in 2015 to spread Nanoengineering concepts through Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality.