3 ms·
ASICs are going to rid a large amount of pools. GPU mining and FPGA mining will fade out, because the value returned will be so minimal compared to these monste
by ambiate 13y ago
ASICs are going to rid a large amount of pools. GPU mining and FPGA mining will fade out, because the value returned will be so minimal compared to these monsters. There is a finite amount of bitcoins released for a set amount of time. The power consumed/bitcoin return ratio on GPUs/FPGAs as the difficulty rises due to the ASICs will just leave people frustrated.
GPU mining had one benefit. Once you gave up, you could at least resell the video card or play games. ASICs are basically trash. The FPGAs can be recycled on ebay.
For those uninitiated: Assume I am on an i7 2600k and you are on a Pentium 2 clocked at a fine 200mhz. If we are mining in the same pool (just us), I will probably do 99.99% of the processing, and receive that return. You probably spent more power than me with your outdated technology, and only received 0.000001% of the payout.
- enraged_camel 13y agoI think the tech has gone CPU > GPU > FPGA > ASIC. Makes me wonder what will come next.
- zanny 13y agoYou do realize the whole premise of an application-specific-integrated-circuit is to do one thing the best. If properly architected, an ASIC that does the most SHA hashing with the least transistors will be the best miner, inherent to the technology.
- aristidb 13y agoThat doesn't mean the designs cannot be improved... And once somebody releases an improved design, the older ASICs become far less useful.
- ohazi 13y agoAt this point, an "improved" design would have to mean algorithmic improvements to a hardware SHA algorithm (i.e. not likely). Improvements that you can actually count on would be die shrinks, but these will provide returns in accordance with the tail end of Moore's law. Compared to the multiple-order-of-magnitude improvements from the CPU -> GPU/FPGA -> ASIC jumps, these improvements likely won't even be worth writing home about.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- daniel-cussen 13y agoMaybe someone will figure things out at the circuit level to get hashes out faster. Or figure out better ROMs (with fewer transistors) to store the 64 32-bit fractional parts of cube roots of primes. Or, someday, someone will come up with the coinotron, which, like a transistor or memristor, would be at the boundary between chemical and electrical engineering, targeted at the bottleneck in the hash.
- mrb 13y agoThere is no next step. ASIC is the end-all be-all. (Not even quantum computing can help - there is no known algorithm to help find SHA256 preimages, which is what would be necessary for a Bitcoin mining breakthrough.)
- kijiki 13y agoASIC is the 2nd to last step. The next (final) step is a full custom design, co-developed with the fab process. This is how Intel & AMD design CPUs.
- mrb 13y agoWell, standard cell ASIC vs. full custom ASIC is a rather pedantic distinction IMHO :) By the way, someone has already developped a full custom ASIC for Bitcoin mining: http://3.14.by/en/read/bitfury-bitcoin-mining-chip http://3.14.by/en/read/bitfury-bitcoin-mining-chip