Opinion: The strong driving force behind the continuous innovation of Bitcoin mining machines is the rise in the value of Bitcoin.

According to Josh Metnick, CEO of Navier, a mining consultancy firm CoinDesk, innovations in GPU mining have made it about six times more efficient, on average, to produce bitcoin blocks and earn block rewards, while the average cost of GPU equipment is only twice that of CPU equipment.

These efficiency gains were quickly eclipsed in 2011 when FPGAs were also remodeled to mine Bitcoin. It was calculated that FPGAs could calculate the mathematical operations required to mine Bitcoin twice as fast as the highest-grade GPUs. However, these devices are more labor-intensive to manufacture. FPGAs need to be configured at both the software and hardware levels, meaning that the device must be programmed to run custom code and architected to run that code efficiently.

It is the ability to tweak hardware components on FPGAs that makes these types of devices more suitable for Bitcoin mining than GPUs. Regarding later ASIC mining innovations, it has been calculated that today’s Bitcoin ASIC mining devices are 100 billion times faster than the average CPU in 2009. Rakesh Kumar, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois, believes that a strong driving factor for the development of mining hardware since the birth of Bitcoin is the rising dollar value of Bitcoin, which makes mining an increasingly profitable activity.

The higher the market value of the block reward, the higher the return on mining technology innovation that increases the profit margin of mining machines while reducing operating costs.