What Is An ASIC Miner and Why It Is Best For Bitcoin Mining?

A few years ago, you could easily mine your bitcoins at the comfort of your computer. Today, machines that manage and maintain the bitcoin network have undergone rapid technological advancements that rendered home computers inefficient in bitcoin mining. In order to mine bitcoin, Litecoin, and other top cryptocurrencies, you will need a highly-efficient and dedicated mining hardware. As more and more people engage in bitcoin mining, the complexity of mining also increases. If you are well versed with bitcoin mining, then you probably understand that mining is the process where transactions are verified and then added to the public ledger–popularly referred to as the blockchain. That is how new bitcoins are generated.

For you to productively participate in bitcoin mining, you need a mining software, high internet connectivity, and powerful hardware. They use specific PoW algorithms such as Scrypt for Litecoin, Ethash for Ethereum, and Sha-256 for Bitcoin. Today, many people are mining bitcoins, which means solving the nounce is getting more difficult. That also means you need to have super-powerful hardware in order to crack the mining algorithms. So, what is an ASIC miner, and why is it the best in mining Bitcoin? And is it for professionals? Read on to find out!

What is An ASIC miner?

The application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miner is an efficient hardware designed to mine cryptocurrency professionally.  The computing chip was uniquely made to mine cryptocurrencies and has been in use since 2013 when the first model was sold. Since then, the ASIC miner has taken the crypto industry by storm, and it is nowadays the most widely used cryptocurrency miners. When they were first discovered, ASIC miners were only used in bitcoin mining, but today, there are models for several other currencies like Litecoin and Dash.

The single most significant advantage that ASIC has over its counterparts, the GPU, CPU, and FPGAs, is its ability to perform the specific task it was made for at peak efficiency. That means that they can mine Bitcoin at a higher hash rate than other computing methods. Remember, the more powerful your computing system, the more you earn or, the faster you earn. That’s why many people opt for the ASIC miner as it comes with the highest chances of winning more cryptocurrency than other mining alternatives. While it can mine different types of cryptocurrencies, many users buy ASIC miners for the purposes of mining bitcoins. Your typical GPU, CPU, and FPGAs are designed to handle multiple tasks, rendering them slow. Today, you can purchase your ASIC miner and mine bitcoin faster. However, they are not equally efficient, which means that you need to focus on the best in order to get good returns on your investment.

Why is the ASIC miner a better option?

Bitcoin mining is an entire investment. As a miner, you have to determine whether the cryptocurrency you are mining is worth more than what you are spending on electricity, internet, and hardware. That gap may be smaller than you think because mining can be quite expensive. Buying hardware means partying with several thousands of dollars. You also need reliable power and a stable internet connection all year long. That is why you cannot juggle buying less than functional mining hardware. That’s where the ASIC miner comes in, which comes with a practical and efficient component designed to accurately handle the task of mining. From the very beginning of their creation, ASIC miners are made to handle the challenging calculations required and deliver solutions as fast as possible.

An ASIC miner typically includes a power supply, fans, connector, memory block, and a set of microcircuits. This pioneering model used Blade Block Erupter boards, which came with 10GHZ/s hashrate at the consumption power of 100 watts. ASIC miners are designed to effectively deal with complex calculations required in every cryptographic hash algorithm. ASIC miners consume power effectively and offer higher hashrate, making them the ideal bitcoin mining hardware.

ASICs use less power per hash than a CPU or GPU. For an ASIC miner, you only need to set up a power supply, and you are good to go. ASICs are also safer and better for blockchain. ASICs offer much better protection against botnets enabled attacks. Bitcoin mining is a complex process that requires solving challenging algorithms. Miners have to get proper hardware to run through the sequences of calculations that will solve the hash function. As mining bitcoins get popular, only miners with more efficient and faster hardware will get the returns. The ASIC miner is the ideal hardware for the job, as it is a complete package.