A brief historical account of the development of Bitcoin mining machines

Digital currencies that use the POW mechanism do not rely on any organization or institution for issuance, but are generated through a large amount of calculations. Anyone can mine with mining equipment connected to the Internet. From 2009 when Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first batch of Bitcoins using a computer's CPU to the current mainstream digital currencies, individual miners are basically unable to mine them. Mining requires higher and higher computing power, and miners are having a harder time.

Mining started with CPU mining, then transitioned to GPU mining, and finally evolved to the current ASIC (specialized mining machine) mining era. We have sorted out the most complete history of mining machine development based on Bitcoin price, hash power, hash difficulty, and Ethereum price:

01. Brief Introduction

Mining machine development history:

1st generation mining machine: mainly relying on CPU

In the early stages of Bitcoin development, the difficulty of mining was relatively low, so the profits from direct mining on most personal PCs were greater than the power consumption (such as electricity costs generated by mining, machine wear and tear, etc.).

Second generation mining machine: mainly relying on GPU

As the difficulty of mining on the entire network continues to increase, the computing speed of ordinary CPUs can no longer meet the high-difficulty mining algorithms. Therefore, mining equipment assembled with one or more high-end graphics cards was born.

3rd generation mining machines: mainly relying on professional mining machines

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

In early 2013, Pumpkin Zhang developed the first FPGA mining machine, Pumpkin Machine, which opened a new era of FPGA mining. ASIC chips also began to evolve in rounds, from 110nm to 55nm, from 55nm to 28nm, and from 28nm to 16nm.

4th generation mining machine: mainly relying on mining pools

Miners with low computing power have lower and lower advantages in each block, and have only a small chance of getting a share, so the magical thing called "mining pool" appeared. The mining pool concentrates everyone's computing power, which makes it more likely to produce blocks than other miners with weak computing power, and everyone gets a larger share.

02. Main text

A brief historical account of the development of Bitcoin mining machines

On January 3, 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto used a multi-core CPU to mine the Bitcoin Genesis Block.

In September 2010, GPU Bitcoin mining code appeared, breaking the CPU mining convention.

The first mining pool, slushpool, appeared in December 2010.

The FPGA Bitcoin mining machine appeared in June 2011, which was the first professional chip designed for mining.

In May 2012, the world's first crowdfunding of mining machines was launched, and Butterfly Miner began crowdfunding.

In August 2012, BBQ started crowdfunding for ASIC mining machines.

In November 2012, Bitcoin experienced its first halving.

In January 2013, the Kaomao mining machine began to pay dividends.

In January 2013, Avalon delivered the first commercial Bitcoin ASIC mining machine.

In May 2013, the Bitcoin mining pool F2Pool was opened.

In June 2013, the Swedish company KNC opened pre-orders for the Mercury/Saturn/Jupiter series of mining machines.

The first generation of Antminer began shipping in December 2013.

At the end of 2013, the development of the Kaomao mining machine suffered a setback and its share of computing power plummeted.

Avalon's third-generation mining machine was delivered in April 2014.

In May 2014, the GHash.IO mining pool emerged.

In May 2014, GHash.IO promised at a mining group meeting that it would limit the computing power to no more than 50%.

In July 2014, KNC released the 20nm mining machine Neptune.

In August 2014, FriedCat released the mining machine tube.

In October 2014, the BTCCC mining pool Guochi was launched.

In December 2014, Bitmain launched the Antminer S5.

Avalon Miner A6 was shipped in December 2015.

In June 2016, Bitmain launched the cost-effective mining machine S9, which has dominated the mining machine market ever since.

Avalon Miner A7 was shipped in November 2016.

In December 2016, Ebit launched the mining machine E9.

In July 2017, Bitcoin Cash forked to compete with Bitcoin in computing power.

In February 2018, it was estimated that Bitmain had a 70-80% market share in the mining machine market.

In February 2018, it was estimated that Bitmain had a 70-80% market share in the mining machine market.

As of February 2018, Ant Mainland’s mining pools accounted for over 40% of the market share.

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From January 2017 to January 30, 2018, there were 11,783 Bitcoin network nodes worldwide, of which 828 were in China, accounting for 7.03%, ranking third in the world.

In February 2017, the Bitcoin network was severely congested, with over 100,000 unconfirmed transactions at its peak.

As of April 2017, the world's three largest mining machine manufacturers, Bitmain, Canaan Creative and Ebang Technology, were all born in China.

In April 2017, the computing power of domestic mining pools accounted for about 70% of the total network computing power.

In May 2017, mining representatives representing 83.28% of the Bitcoin computing power of the entire network reached an SW+2M Bitcoin protocol upgrade plan in New York.

In June 2017, a vulnerability in the mining chip design of Antminer could be remotely controlled.

By June 2017, Bitmain's mining machines had a 70-80% market share.

In July 2017, the computing power of Ant Pool exceeded 1000PH/s.

In August 2017, Bitmain led the BCH fork.

In August 2017, Shenma launched the Bitcoin mining machine M3.

After China completely banned digital currency transactions in September 2017, the transaction volume on the Bitcoin chain fell sharply and then quickly rebounded.

In September 2017, mining pools such as F2Pool and BTCC also stopped signaling support for Segwit2x, and the New York Consensus collapsed.

In September 2017, Bitmain received $50 million in funding and planned to produce chips for artificial intelligence.

In September 2017, Japanese company GMO announced plans to use 7-nanometer chips for Bitcoin mining operations.

In September 2017, Bixin closed cloud computing power transactions, and mining pools such as F2Pool and BTCC also stopped signaling support for Segwit2x.

In November 2017, domestic mining regulations became stricter and Bitcoin mining began to go overseas.

After viabtc banned digital currency transactions in mainland China in November 2017, it opened the computing power contract trading market.

In December 2017, the annual growth rates of Bitcoin network computing power between 2011 and 2017 were 72 times/33 times/432 times/35 times/2.3 times/3.2 times/6.5 times respectively.

In January 2018, the mining pool ViaBTC announced that it would increase management fees based on computing power, from the previous 6% to 50%, a price increase of more than 730%.

In February 2018, Bitcoin transaction fees dropped to one-tenth of their peak.

In February 2018, Haitong Securities predicted that the average quarterly growth rate of the total network computing power in 2018 would be between 40% and 70%, and the neutral estimate of the mining chip packaging and testing market size would be 6 billion yuan.

In February 2018, BTC.com and Ant Pool accounted for more than 40% of the market share.

Ethereum’s mainnet was officially launched in July 2015.

In July 2015, AMD released graphics cards 370/380.

In June 2016, The Dao incident occurred and the Ethereum network forked into ETC/ETH.

In July 2016, AMD released graphics cards 470/480.

In July 2016, nVidia released graphics cards 1060/1070/1080.

In October 2016, nVidia released the graphics card 1050Ti.

In October 2016, AMD released the 470d graphics card to compete with the 1050Ti.

In October 2016, AMD released the graphics cards VEGA56/VEGA64.

In November 2016, Panda Miner released the graphics card mining machine B1.

In February 2017, nVidia released the graphics card 1080Ti.

In March 2017, Panda Miner released the graphics card mining machine B3.

In June 2017, nVidia released the mining graphics card P106/P104.

In September 2017, Bitmain released the graphics card mining machine G2.

In October 2017, nVidia released the graphics card 1070Ti.

In February 2018, Bitfily launched the Snow Leopard mining machine.

In March 2018, Bitmain officially released the CryptoNight algorithm mining machine X3 overseas.