A brief history of mining machines in the digital currency world: from GPU to the era of two major players

Since the day when the first Bitcoin block was generated, the profession of miner was born. As we all know, the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, the proposer of the Bitcoin white paper, paid special attention to the fairness of mining. He originally planned to use CPU mining, and most people only needed an ordinary home computer to participate in the chasing game in the digital currency world, giving more people the right to participate.

However, as the number of miners increases, the difficulty of mining in the entire network continues to increase, and the computing speed of ordinary CPUs will soon be unable to meet the higher difficulty of mining algorithms. In the torrent of history, the technological arms race in the mining circle is a bold and colorful stroke. Today at Avalon Primary School, the editor will tell you in detail about the mining world.

The first year of GPU (2010)

In January 2010, the computing power of GPUs reached 9MH/S, compared to the computing power of CPUs, which was only about 1KH/S. During the same period, the price of Bitcoin saw its first major rise, from $0.008 to $0.08 in 5 days. The super computing power of GPUs and the appreciation of Bitcoin gave miners confidence in Bitcoin mining.

July 18 of the same year: A miner named ArtForz was the first to successfully mine with a personal GPU, opening a new era of mining.

It only took a few months for CPU chips to go from being popular to being ignored. Miners have truly promoted the development of mining machines with their consumption choices, and GPU mining machines have renewed their faith.

But before GPU mining machines could gain a foothold, new challengers were already at the gate.

The short-lived FPGA (2011)

In February 2011, the price of Bitcoin exceeded $1 for the first time, and in June it climbed to 30 yuan. Stronger computing power means greater returns on investment, and urgent market demand boosts the speed of innovation.

In June 2011, the first FPGA Bitcoin mining machine appeared on the market. This was the first professional chip designed for mining. By stacking and combining multiple FPGAs, it can provide multiple mining computing power support.

Compared with computer CPU and graphics card mining, the era of FPGA mining was particularly short, lasting only half a year.

Futures mining machine Waterloo (2012

May 2012: The world's first crowdfunding for mining machines appeared, and Butterfly ASIC mining machines began crowdfunding.

Butterfly comes from the United States and appears in the form of futures. It announced that it would start shipping in March 2013 and began accepting pre-orders. The product parameters were planned to reach 50G or even 1500G, and the price ranged from US$149 to US$29,899. For example, the price of 5G is US$270, and it is claimed that the investment can be recovered within 3 days.

Butterfly required customers to pay the full amount in advance, but delayed delivery after receiving the payment. As of September 2013, more than 20,000 customers who had paid had not received their goods.

On September 23, 2014, San Francisco time, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against Missouri-based Butterfly Labs for deceptively marketing computers that generate Bitcoins. A local federal court has closed the company at the commission's request.

At this time, the computing power level and reputation of the Butterfly Miner were also spurned by the tide of the times.

The Magic Pumpkin Zhang (2012-2013)

In January 2013, Pumpkin Zhang successfully launched the world's first ASIC supercomputer chip A3256 that can be used for digital blockchain computing and the corresponding mining machine product Avalon (Avalon) 1. It can be said that the Avalon team opened a new era of ASIC mining.

Since then, ASIC chips have also started a round of evolution, from 110nm to 55nm, from 55nm to 28nm, from 28nm to 16nm, and then to the application of 7nm in 2018. The ASIC mining machine created by the Avalon team has brought the Bitcoin computing power pattern to a new dimension and has taken a lead in the computing power competition. In 5 years, the company has occupied more than 35% of the global new computing power market.

The advent of ASIC mining machines has opened up an era of competition among chip developers. A large number of mining machine manufacturers have failed in the computing power competition and have been buried in the dust of history without any gains. Among them, the more famous ones are: Pigeon, ASICME, MQH, Dragon Mine, Shenyu, and 42BTC.

The rise and fall of the BBQ era (2013-2014)

In the second half of 2013, BBK Miner launched a number of ASIC-based mining products, such as 13G blade mining machine, 10GMini mining machine, and 38GBOX mining machine. With precise timing and strong R&D and iteration capabilities, Avalon and BBK Miner became the two major mining machine overlords.

At the end of 2013, Avalon developed the second generation of products, equipped with a self-developed 55nm ASIC chip, with a computing power increase of 75% year-on-year, which was enthusiastically sought after by miners, and the price of a single machine was raised to 18,000 yuan per unit. In the same month, Bitmain announced its official entry into the market with the S1 mining machine.

In October 2013, the R&D of the FriedCat Miner encountered a bottleneck and failed to produce the second-generation chip in time; in January 2014, the third-generation chip successfully developed by the FriedCat Miner had an explosion problem that was difficult to repair, and 14,000 mining chips were unsold. Due to the serious R&D setbacks, the FriedCat Miner gradually faded out of the public's view.

Two-legged tripod (2015-)

In 2015, the ice age of Bitcoin ended and Bitcoin gradually recovered. The once prosperous mining circle was left with only two survivors: Bitmain and Canaan Creative.

In November 2015, Avalon completed the mass production and shipment of A7, with a computing power of 7.3T. At the end of 2017, Avalon launched the A841 model to compete with Antminer S9. Currently, these two models account for more than 35% of the computing power of the entire network. In March 2018, Avalon A851 was released, which upgraded the performance based on A841 and had a computing power of up to 14.5T, surpassing the computing power of Antminer S9.

In November 2017, Bitmain launched the "Suanfeng" series of cloud AI chips. In September of the same year, Canaan Creative (Avalon's parent company) released the artificial intelligence KPU chip, which can be used in smart terminals, voice recognition, image processing and other fields, announcing its official entry into the field of artificial intelligence.

I believe everyone knows what happened next. In August 2018, our company released the world's first mass-produced 7nm mining chip, and released the first mining machine Avalon A9 series based on 7nm chips. We are also actively developing 5nm chips, aiming to lead the mining machine industry and develop in a more professional direction.

In the current Bitcoin world, Bitcoin mining machines are at a stage where "three generations" of chips are competing on the same field - the last two generations of 16nm chips, the last generation of 10nm chips and the latest 7nm chips. Although the 16nm chip is the most mature, its physical limit is approaching the ceiling. Under the conditions of increasing mining difficulty and unpredictable currency prices, every surviving company is desperately running forward, because only by running non-stop can they be qualified to get a ticket to the next arena.