ASIC mining rigs dominate the biggest cryptocurrency blockchains in today’s crypto world. An ASIC miner is an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit miner or mining rig, these are purpose-built computers with one sole purpose of mining Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
Without going into a full history of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency mining, mining basically evolved from using a CPU, to a GPU (graphics card), to ASIC miners. Once efficient ASIC mining rigs are created for a specific mining algorithm, for example with Bitcoin and the sha-256 mining algorithm, there is no going back. There are ASIC miners developed for many cryptocurrency mining algorithms now, in addition to sha-256 other popular ASIC mining algorithms include equihash, ethash, eaglesong, and many others. An ASIC miner will always outperform a graphics card or GPU mining rig when mining on the same algorithm.
The controversy of ASIC mining mainly revolves around availability and manufacturers. Many people have a normal computer in their household, and some people even have gaming computers with high-end graphics cards, these are components that would be effective at mining cryptocurrencies. There is no one who happens to have a Bitmain Antminer ASIC miner sitting in their basement that they check their email with and now want to use it to mine crypto coins!
Here’s Miss Vosk of VoskCoin with one of her ASIC miners, this was an Antminer from Bitmain
Anyway, to sum up, ASIC miners, again, they’re purpose-built crypto mining devices, comprised of TONs of these ASIC chips. Manufacturers like Bitmain, Innosilicon, Canaan, and several other (mainly) China based manufacturing companies produce these ASIC mining rigs. Typically they’re housed in a silver metal rectangle with one fan on each side blasting air through the unit across all of the ASIC chips to keep the ASIC mining rig cool and able to mine. ASIC miners are known for their loud noise, high power consumption and thus large heat output.
If you’d like to learn more about ASIC mining we invite you to explore the www.voskcointalk.com forum, watch videos on the VoskCoin YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/voskcoin like this one below!