ASIC is the inevitable trend of digital currency development

Monero plans to modify its algorithm to combat ASIC mining machines; the Ethereum community has also submitted a proposal to modify the mining algorithm to make ASIC mining machines incompatible with the Ethereum network. The debate over mining has once again caused an uproar.

Satoshi Nakamoto originally designed Bitcoin to be mined using computers, relying mainly on the CPU for calculations. This had been going on peacefully in the past, but as the price of Bitcoin grew higher and higher, and the market grew larger, competition became fierce. Mining became an industry, and the difficulty of mining continued to rise, so miners began to improve the competitiveness of their hardware.

The profit-seeking choice made miners start to build large-scale CPU/GPU mining farms in places with cheap electricity. Later, miners found that although Intel and AMD's CPU/GPU were becoming more and more powerful, computer CPU/GPU was a general-purpose processor that was not good at mining, and it was also very noisy and consumed a lot of resources.

So professional mining machines ASIC appeared. ASIC chip professional mining machines refer to mining machines made with specially customized hardware chips. They are very common in the manufacturing industry. A chip is designed specifically to achieve a specific function. At the same price, the performance of ASIC mining machines is often hundreds to thousands of times that of CPU/GPU mining machines. In short, specialized ASIC chips have higher performance, lower energy consumption, smaller size, and can reduce costs when mass-produced.

CPU/GPU are both general-purpose, while ASIC chips are special-purpose. It can be understood this way: traditional CPU/GPU has strong comprehensive capabilities and is not proficient in many skills; while ASIC is only proficient in one skill.

There is no threshold for mining, and anyone can participate in mining. Currently, the main CPU/GPU manufacturers on the market are only Intel and NVIDIA, while ASIC mining machine manufacturers include Bitmain, Avalon, Yibit, BW, Bitfury, Shenma, and Xindong. ASIC mining machines provide a more efficient, lower-cost, and more environmentally friendly way. Compared with the previous CPU/GPU mining farms, it is fairer at the equipment level and far superior to the highly monopolized graphics cards and CPUs.

The prevalence of ASICs is the inevitable result of the phased trend of mining. Resource-consuming manufacturing industries will inevitably focus on efficient resource utilization. Professional mining is a market choice and cannot be changed by human will.

In the white paper, Satoshi Nakamoto defines mining as “printing and distributing currency without a centralized authority”. In other words, Satoshi Nakamoto believes that mining is a fair currency issuance mechanism, and ASIC is just a byproduct of fair competition, because an excellent digital currency ecosystem recognized by the public will inevitably have professional miners and professional-grade equipment.

Any algorithm that uses POW will have mining machines similar to ASICs. It is just a matter of time. POW has maintained the safe and stable operation of Bitcoin for 9 years and has proven to be a safe and reliable mechanism. ASIC maintains the security and stability of mainstream POW-based currencies such as Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin.