The most important branch of the blockchain industry is cryptocurrencies and their derivatives. In this championship competition, everyone wants to maximize their profit, reduce the risk of potential losses and evade exorbitant energy costs by increasing efficiency. At the moment, ASIC mining devices are the best option.
Since 2009 and when miners could mine more than 50 Bitcoins for each block, the cryptocurrency mining industry has witnessed several alterations until now. Once miners used their internet-connected PCs to mine Bitcoins using CPU processing power.
Then it was the turn of professional Graphic cards that became the trend of the mining market, which we know are GPUs. In the past few years, the most revolutionary movement were different generations of ASIC miners, which are Hardware devices with software programs that maximize the efficiency of the mining process.
Different Methods for Crypto Mining
There are three main classifications for crypto mining:
I – Solo Mining
In the Solo Mining method, crypto miners mine for themselves. However, it seems much more challenging to earn block rewards this way, but it happened 3times in Q1 2022.
II – Mining Pools
When a group of miners begins to work together to share their computational power to mine crypto, in this method, they increase their chance to min a block faster and share block rewards. Miners also pay a small percentage of the mined block rewards to the mining pool they have joined as a pool fee.
III – Cloud Mining
When someone pays a company to mine crypto with its miner machines, it is Cloud Mining.
This method requires a contract between the interested individual and the company. Not always, but mostly, the terms almost always favor the company, not the miner.
What are Mining Devices?
CPU Mining
Mining with a computer’s central processing unit is CPU mining. Maybe this is the most convenient way to mine cryptocurrencies. Still, please remember that CPUs don’t provide enough mining power like ASICs or GPUs, making this method uneconomical but possible.
GPU Mining
While a miner uses one or more advanced graphics processing units (GPUs), we know them as graphics cards. In the GPU mining method, the chance of mining a block is high, as much as the mining costs are high.
ASIC Mining
In this method, ASIC miner owners Mine blocks using an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). Devices designed to mine a specific cryptocurrency with different algorithms. ASIC miners are usually expensive, but it also gives the owners the highest hash rate, making ASIC miners more attractive than others in the market.
ASIC Miner, GPU Mining and CPU Mining
What is ASIC?
To understand the ASIC miner, we first recommend knowing what ASIC stands for “Application Specific Integrated Circuit.” The processing chips’ built-in mining machines spend their computational power to follow an algorithm which results in mine a specific cryptocurrency like Bitcoin.
Chase ASIC Mining in Bitcoin Mining History
In the first days of Bitcoin, miners were mining bitcoin with only a PC’s CPU, which could mine more than 50 BTC in ten minutes. But the price rose due to Bitcoin’s halving rule, which reduced the number of block rewards to half in each halving period.
With the significant growth in the mining market and competition from one side and increasing the demand for Bitcoin from the other side, bitcoin mining became more complicated, and the speed of the process was a challenge for bitcoin miners. Soon after, developers discovered that they had to improve the performance, and the whole market shifted to using GPUs for bitcoin mining. Still, unfortunately, GPU mining was not the final solution.
The Advantages of ASIC Mining
In a few words, ASIC miners are better than CPUs and GPUs when mining cryptocurrencies. They are more potent in providing processing power because ASIC miners process much more data per unit of time.
Cryptocurrency mining with ASIC miners releases new coins via validating new blocks and verifying transactions to the blockchain. It is necessary to keep devices continuously on the internet, mainly a combination of mining hardware and software, to manage the whole mining process. Miner machines must solve plenty of mathematical puzzles, which consume lots of energy and the side product of this process is heat. To keep devices performing, we need to keep all units in the specified operating temperature range declared by the OEM. Machines and cooling systems consume a considerable portion of energy which is critical and expensive.
Besides, the miner who first accomplishes the puzzle can add the mined block to the chain of previously mined blocks and claim the rewards. Two factors convince us to join a mining pool, increase the efficiency of the time spent, consume energy and initial funds to purchase machines and find a solution to increase the chance to mine the next block faster than other working miners. However, joining a mining pool necessitate miners to pay a service fee to the mining pool, and in the end, they have to share the reward with other participating miners. Still, it is more likely to mine a block and get the reward of the next block faster than other competitors in the blockchain ecosystem.
The Top 10 Best ASIC Mining Devices
- Antminer S19 Pro+ Hyd (198Th)
- MicroBT Whatsminer M50s (126Th)
- Bitmain. Antminer S19 XP
- MicroBT. Whatsminer M30S++ 112T
- Bitmain. Antminer S19 Pro
- Bitmain. Antminer S19j Pro
- MicroBT. Whatsminer M30S+ 100T
- Bitmain. Antminer S19
- Canaan. Avalon 1246 90T
- Canaan. Avalon 1246
Conclusion
Solving those complicated mathematical puzzles with hardware devices, being sharper than other competitors (here miners), being the luckiest miner, reducing costs of consuming energy, and the needed area to install machines are factors that we can’t control. Intelligent people with elite attitudes always find efficient alternative solutions to cover their costs with profit. When they want to mine cryptocurrencies, they choose ASIC mining units and perhaps join a mining pool to share a part of their reward but considerably increase their chance to mine the next block before others.