A brief history of bitcoin mining hardware

Bitcoin mining was once just a lucrative hobby for nerdy crypto enthusiasts. Initially, all you needed was a simple computer. 

In 2009, the first bitcoin mining hardware used standard multi-core CPUs to generate 50 BTC per block. If you had a few decent PCs around, you could make about five dollars a day. The difficulty of mining (the amount of computing power required) was so low that it was worth it for hobbyists and crypto enthusiasts to get involved.

Today, 50 BTC mining will reward you with more than $ 434,000 per block. Just over a month ago, when trading at about $ 20,000, that same cow "hobby" would have earned you almost a million dollars.

However, if you're going to jump into your time machine, don't go back to the old 2009. It was an odd time when people were using GPUs to play video games instead of playing with cardboard, as we are doing now. For this reason, we recommend that you turn your Delorean's date display to 2010 and bring pizza.

I'll pay 10,000 bitcoins for a few pizzas .. maybe like 2 big bitcoins so I have some leftovers the next day. I love eating pizza now for a later snack. You can make the pizza yourself and bring it to my home or order it for me from a delivery point.

Eventually, someone accepted him, and Hanyecz began eating an $ 8.6 million meal just eight years later.

More importantly, bitcoin mining code with GPUs was made public in October 2010. As the mining difficulty increased, so did the need for better, more specialized hardware. GPUs were up and running.

Mining bitcoin on a single GPU required little technical skill. Almost anyone with a few hundred dollars could do it, and the computing requirements were still low enough to be worth it. However, this will change quickly as the cryptocurrency begins to gain the attention of the community, as they start to get some great ideas about mining hardware.

A crowdsourced standard has evolved in which five GPUs are suspended over an inexpensive AMD motherboard with minimal DRAM, connected by five PCI Express extension cables to reduce motherboard costs, and a large, high-efficiency power supply is used to power all GPUs.

Finally, there was a way for little people to make money using cryptography and the magic of blockchain. It was time for everyone to quit their jobs, put on fairly affordable mining gear, and drink Pina Coladas on the beach.

Apart from mining, the difficulty continued to increase, and with that, the power requirements would soon become too steep for your average hobby to make money. As of June 2011, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are all the rage.

Mining began to scale after FPGAs were modified for this purpose. The major attraction of this hardware was that it used three times less power than simple GPU setups to effectively perform the same task. In cryptocurrency, for a short time, FPGAs were the best thing since sliced bread.

Still, if you're a standalone miner who likes your GPU setup back in 2011, the post was on the wall. FPGAs soon gave way to application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) systems, and Bitcoin moved from hobby to industry.

When the FPGA needs to be fine-tuned after purchase (the field-programmable part of the FPGA), then an ASIC is created for a specific use, such as mining cryptocurrency. This is why ASIC miners are standard.

It is impossible to predict the future of Bitcoin, and there are numerous altcoins you can mine without having to invest millions of dollars in storage space, hardware, and electricity.

However, for those who can afford it, the lure of bitcoin mining continues to be lucrative, at least for hardware manufacturers.

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