ASIC is what you will come across if you decide to get involved in Bitcoin mining – the acronym stands for “Application Specific Integrated Circuit”. In the image above, you will see a line of ASICs that are part of a bitcoin mining operation that helps process bitcoin transactions.
When Bitcoin started, people could mine it just by using their regular computer’s GPU (graphics card), but over time this became less efficient. More and more people started using Bitcoin and therefore more transactions were broadcast on the blockchain.
ASICs became the must-have mining gear because they were specifically designed for Bitcoin mining and could process many more transactions much more efficiently than GPUs.
Anyone who wants to get into mining these days will probably need an ASIC.