https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_integrated_circuit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_integrate... Bitcoin mining started on

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_integrated_circuit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_integrate... Bitcoin mining started on general-purpose CPUs. Then people discovered they could compute more hashes per watt on GPUs. Then people realised that a custom circuit optimised just to perform that calculation would be most efficient, starting with FPGAs and then burning those circuits into ASICs. All mining that is feasible these days is done with specially-built ASICs, and even then the cost of mining 1 BTC (hardware and electricity) is hovering around 1 BTC.