[Hardware] ASIC for mining cryptocurrencies, what are they and how do they work?

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As the world of cryptocurrency mining is doing, dedicated gaming GPUs are out of stock in large part due to miners, who hog almost all of the stock before it even hits stores. Fortunately, there are specific devices for mining cryptocurrencies called ASICs that could represent the solution to this problem, and in this article we are going to tell you what they are, what they do and of course how to get them and if they are worth doing.

Cryptocurrency mining used to be something that could be done easily, but those days are behind us. Nowadays, whether you intend to mine Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, DASH or any other cryptocurrency, the most effective way to do it is with dedicated hardware known as ASIC miner or ASIC miner, and even then only professionals with large amounts of capital. they can afford the necessary investment.

What is an ASIC and what does it consist of?
The definition of ASIC comes from the acronym in English that stands for Integrated Circuit for Specific Applications, in this case for cryptocurrency mining. In other words, it is hardware that has been specifically designed for a specific purpose, such as an ASIC for audio processing or for managing calls from a smartphone, but in the case that concerns us today it is equipment designed to mine specific cryptocurrencies.

ASIC Antminer E3 for Ethereum

Simply put, mining performs complicated calculations in search of a specific number, and whether it is done with a conventional GPU or an ASIC miner, the mining hardware must run a lot of calculations to be able to find the desired number. In a proof-of-work system such as Bitcoin, the first to find that number gets the full reward, although there are other types of mining (pools) that when someone in the group finds the number, the reward is divided among everyone depending on their contribution to the calculations and therefore the mining power you are providing equals the net profit in the form of cryptocurrencies.

It is for this reason that many miners choose directly to invest in an ASIC, since it gives them a greater possibility of being the ones who find the number that the cryptocurrency will give them, or in the case of participating in pools they will have a higher participation quota and with it a greater profit.

Each cryptocurrency has its own cryptographic hashing algorithm, and ASIC miners are designed to mine using that specific algorithm. Bitcoin ASIC miners are designed to calculate the SHA-256 hash algorithm, while those designed for Litecoin use Scrypt. This means that you could technically mine any other coin that is based on the same algorithm, although generally as each ASIC is designed for a specific coin, the ideal is to mine only that one.

Why are ASICs better than GPUs for mining?
When it comes to mining cryptocurrencies, what really matters is that the one you have chosen to mine is worth more than what you spend on electricity and the hardware you have bought for it. Those margins may be closer than you think because this hardware is expensive and requires an additional investment, in addition to the fact that the cost of electricity can cost you thousands of euros per year (depending of course on the number of equipment you have and the time they are mining. ).

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By choosing optimized and dedicated hardware for mining, you will have a much more efficient system, or put another way, it generates much more hashrate per watt consumed than using a normal GPU for mining. This is because in reality a PC with a conventional CPU and GPU is designed to do a lot of different tasks, but an ASIC is made only for the purpose of mining so all its computing power is focused on that exclusively.

Due to this unique approach, they are incredibly powerful and efficient when mining. They offer high hashrate and use much less energy than a PC when mining, at least if we equate them in terms of hashrate (that is, if an ASIC obtains for example 100 MH / s consuming 100 watts, to reach 100 MH / s with a normal PC you would have to consume about 400 watts of power). This combination of performance and low energy use makes them much cheaper in the long run, although it is true that as you will see now, they are quite expensive in terms of initial investment.

In fact, when we talk about Bitcoin mining, which is the oldest and longest-lived, it is only done using ASIC miners because the difficulty is so high that it is no longer profitable to do it using conventional PC graphics cards.