It is a well-known fact that bitcoin mining hardware has changed by leaps and bounds in recent times due to the evolution of new central processing units in the market. On April 6, Monero tweaked its mining algorithm to curb any potential threat of ASICs and preserve ASIC resistance.” That same day, Ethereum core developers met to discuss whether they should change Ethereum's algorithm and ultimately decided not to for the time being, much to the chagrin of the Ethereum community.
ASICs have been around for decades and can be found in many common appliances such as your cell phone, but their adoption as cryptocurrency miners only happened within mining rig the last few first Bitcoin ASICs were sold in 2013, and since then ASIC miners have been developed for a number of other coins, such as Litecoin and Dash.
ASICs are smaller and do not require any additional maintenance to perform their functions — you simply switch it on, provide with your wallet address, and wait for the coins to come in. At the same time, remember that they are more powerful and consume lots of electricity.
Standard-cell design is intermediate between § Gate-array and semi-custom design and § Full-custom design in terms of its non-recurring engineering and recurring component costs as well as performance and speed of development (including time to market ).
It's not crazy to think the entire network hashrate will double, and with multipools we can expect to see this hash rate divided among the most popular coins, with Litecoin taking a large portion of this - right now Litecoin makes up 25.477% of the total network hashrate.
If you haven't turned a profit in four months, there is little chance you are ever going to. Setting the difficulty at 21772 gives time for your asic to be shipped, arrived and set up as many asics are still only preorders with promised shipping dates.
Further, there has also been a growing interest in Russia's Eastern Siberia region, where the Brastsk hydropower station built in the Cold War era has been utilized to power mining farms that are estimated to account for almost 10 percent of the total computing power on the bitcoin network.
Nevertheless, when a designer makes claims regarding hash rates at certain clock frequencies, one can determine if A. there is a straightforward calculation and B. if the designer is being imprecise (rounding values) or even intentionally dishonest, as the ratio between clock cycles and hash rate should remain the same.
This, together with the sky-high prices of ASIC miners, has made mining on personal computers impossible for common users, which conflicts with the original spirit that absolutely anyone can mine Bitcoin for themselves, without having to pay fees to a third party.
Due to the incredible amount of money mining farms have invested, Proof of Work systems have essentially turned into Proof of Stake blockchains as most of the network is secured by entities that have bought resources for the sole purpose of acquiring hash rate.
The main advantage of using an ASIC to mine Ethereum is it is far more efficient than a GPU. In the last few months, bitcoin has started to grow again, sustained by an increasingly higher hashrate , to the extent that the previous historical record has been broken, with some short-term corrections.