ASIC miner

An ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) miner is a computer built to do one thing: compute a particular hash algorithm as fast and efficiently as possible. Bitcoin ASICs only perform SHA-256 hashing and are thousands of times more efficient at it than ordinary computer processors or graphics cards.

The first Bitcoin ASICs appeared in early 2013 and quickly made CPU and GPU mining unprofitable for bitcoin. Today the market is dominated by a few manufacturers, such as Bitmain (Antminer), MicroBT (Whatsminer) and Canaan. Machines are compared by hash rate, measured in terahashes per second (TH/s), and efficiency, measured in joules per terahash (J/TH).

ASIC mining profitability depends mainly on electricity cost, the price of bitcoin, network difficulty and the machine's efficiency. Machines become obsolete within a few years as newer models arrive. Coins such as Litecoin and Dogecoin have their own Scrypt ASICs. Some projects design their algorithms to resist ASICs and keep mining open to ordinary hardware.