Whether you are a novice in Bitcoin mining, an experienced enthusiast, or an out-and-out professional, it’s always important to stay up-to-date when it comes to your mining devices. New mining hardware equipment appears on the market every few months, offering miners a great deal of choice and a pain-in-the-neck FOMO feeling the moment they realize there is yet another pretty toy out there that everybody is talking about.
Bitcoin is the very first known cryptocurrency, which was created back in 2009. At first, Bitcoin mining was possible even on processors. However, with the increase in CPU mining popularity and its cost, the complexity of the mining calculations grew more and more. The high price and the demand led to the development of ASICs for mining, which perform calculations in the SHA-256 encryption algorithm in the Bitcoin code.
In this article, you will learn about Bitcoin mining history and decide whether or not to invest in Bitcoin equipment. We’ll give you a piece of advice on the overall mining process and show you the most profitable hardware to mine Bitcoin now. Let’s look at the most efficient, popular, and balanced models on the mining devices market. Spoiler: here they come:
Once upon a time, crypto coins could be mined using an ordinary computer. With the growing popularity of cryptocurrencies, the difficulty of mining has increased. The miners needed a device that would allow them to mine more coins in less time. This is how ASICs appeared.
As we already said, before the ASICs, coins were mined using video cards and computer processors. However, these methods became unprofitable due to the increase in capacity and high electricity bills. These problems were solved by introducing ASIC miners to the markets. By the way, ASIC stands for Application-Specific Integrated Circuit.
ASIC mining is the process of cryptocurrency mining using special equipment. ASICs are created specifically for mining certain coins on the same algorithm. The principles are the same as for a video card: ASICs are engaged in decoding the blockchain and creating new blocks. It differs in that calculations are carried out using special chips.
However, ASICs appeared long before cryptocurrencies. They were first used to speed up graphics in computers in the 1980s. Later, ASICs were used in many electronic devices to optimize and speed up work.
At the first sight, an ASIC is just a microcircuit that performs a certain work type. In the 21st century, these microcircuits allow decrypting algorithms at the heart of a particular blockchain. Each cryptocurrency operates based on a specific algorithm. These algorithms may or may not be the same for different cryptocurrencies. It is crucial to choose an ASIC that matches the exact cryptocurrency algorithm you are going to mine.
There is a way to mine Bitcoin without ASIC miners or any other hardware. Cloud mining or remote mining is a model for mining cryptocurrency using remote hardware power. Cloud mining allows users to launch cryptocurrency mining without large investments and any technical skills.
At the moment, there are two options for cloud mining:
