Tag: crypto mining

  • ASIC Miner the Best Crypto Mining

    ASIC Miner the Best Crypto Mining

     

    3 min read

    ASIC Miner the Best Crypto Mining
    To introduce ASIC miner, we have to know what crypto mining is. The mining is not just a way to make money but an essential and fundamental piece of any cryptocurrency. Mining is the mechanism that secures the cryptocurrency blockchain and continuously enlarge it. Cryptocurrency Mining is important like it is an important central bank in any economy. The main difference is that mining is costly and is regulated by the network rules.

    In economies, printing new money is cheap and happens by the will of politicians and bank officials.

    Cryptocurrency mining was originally designed to be something everyone could do with their home computer, but those days are long away behind us. Today, whether you’re mining Bitcoin, Litecoin, DASH, or some other cryptocurrencies, the most effective way to do so is with a piece of hardware known as an ASIC miner.

    It’s not a desktop PC or a dedicated graphics card mining rig. It’s something else. Full name is Application specific integrated circuits. That are chips that are designed with a singular purpose, ranging from audio processing to managing a cellphone call.

    In the case of cryptocurrency mining, these chips are built into specifically-designed motherboards and power supplies. All constructed into a single unit. It is an intentionally designed and developed hardware right down to the chip level.

    What ASIC miner does

    In short, mining is the process of running complicated calculations in the search for a specific number. Mining hardware has to run through many calculations before finding that number. In proof of work systems like Bitcoin, the first one to find that number gets a reward in Bitcoins.

    Miners also try and find that number and tend to earn more if they have faster hardware. That’s why people who can afford it opt for ASIC miners because it gives them the greatest chance of earning cryptocurrency in exchange for their investment.

    ASIC Miner the Best Crypto Mining 1
    Each cryptocurrency has its own cryptographic hash algorithm. ASIC miners are designed to mine using that specific algorithm.

    Bitcoin ASIC miners are actually designed to calculate the SHA-256 hash algorithm. In the case of Litecoin, it is Scrypt.

    Technically they could mine any other coin based on the same algorithm. But people who buy ASIC hardware designed with one particular coin in mind, mine that coin.

    Why is ASIC miner better?

    ASIC miners differ from CPU mining system in more general pieces of hardware which are designed to do more than one thing.

    While mining cryptocurrencies, the most important thing is that the cryptocurrency you mine is worth more than what you spend on hardware and electricity. Those margins are closer than you can imagine. Mining cryptocurrency can be very expensive.

    Hardware can be expensive, and you can spend thousands of dollars a year in electricity to run.

    That’s why the mining hardware you choose, have to have more efficient systems. This is incredibly important. That’s where ASIC miners come in. They are designed from the ground up to perform the calculations required by a specific cryptographic hash algorithm used by an individual.

    They are unbelievably efficient at doing so. They’re powerful, they are offering a high “hashrate”, and energy efficient, using far less power than a more general piece of hardware might do for the same task.

    This combination of performance and low-power usage are the reasons why they are much more economical than other hardware.

    In the case of Bitcoin and Litecoin, ASIC mining is just about the only way anyone mines those cryptocurrencies any more.

    How to choose the best ASIC Miner

    The main factors that will help you to determine the best Bitcoin ASIC miner for your personal needs are:

    1 Hash rate. Hash rate is measured in hashes per second. The more powerful your miner is, the bigger the block reward you get.

    2. Efficiency. Hash rate is not the only nor final factor when it comes to picking the best Bitcoin miner. It also has to make the best use of the amount of electricity you spend. Your mining profitability highly depends on your electricity expenses, because you want to get the maximum amount of Bitcoin.

    3. Price. At early stages of Bitcoin mining, it is all about counterbalance with your initial investment. You have to calculate the mining profitability and decide whether it’s worth purchasing a leading miner. Also, you can simply stick around with less expensive one that will give you more efficiency. Not always the most expensive is the most efficient.

    5 the biggest ASIC chip producers

    Bitmain. The Beijing-based company still controls 85% despite the reports that are losing its monopoly status due to the cutthroat competition in this niche of the cryptocurrency industry. Bitmain managed to grow so quickly because of the enormous success of their Antminer line. That includes the legendary miner Antminer S9. Bitmain operates numerous mining pools that are responsible for more than 51 percent of the Bitcoin hashrate.  

    Canaan Creative. Canaan Creative is the second biggest Bitcoin mining hardware manufacturer the world after Bitmain. Apart from plenty of its miners, the company has introduced the first mining TV.

    Halong Mining. There is competition. Back in November 2017, another Chinese manufacturer introduced the world’s most efficient miner Halong DragonMint 16T, continuing an intense ASIC mining hardware race.

    The best ASIC miner on the market

    There is some dilemma Antminer S9, or Antminer S9 Hydro.

    Antminer S9 has already become a legend among ASIC miners, but is this still good enough? You can buy 14 TH/s for less than $700. One of the drawbacks of this miner is that it is very sensitive to high temperature.

    If you want to use it, your primal task is to ensure that it gets good cooling. Let’s say, the best choice is to have one specific room for mining. Bitmain’s previous hit product Antminer S7 has drastically dropped in price after they release Antminer S9.

    Maybe purchasing a couple of used S7 miners is a good idea.

    At the end of August this year, a brand-new ASIC miner appeared on Bitmain’s official website named S9 Hydro. Basically, it is the good old Antminer S9, but they added a new hashing board that increases the total hashrate up to 18 THS. Also S9 Hydro produces is not as noisy as other ASIC miners but the other fundamental technological characteristics are almost the same.

    Halong Mining made Halong Mining DragonMint T1 in November 2017. This ASIC miner managed to pull off up to 16 TH/s, which is a visible improvement from 14 TH/s offered by Antminer S9s. DragonMint T1 has a bit higher efficiency compared to older Antminer S9s, but it didn’t even come close to the previously declared numbers. But, it’s up to you to consider whether you want to pay $300 more for this miner.

    The advantage

    One of the evident advantages of DragonMint T1  as a type of ASIC miner is its cooling solution. It is presented in the form of dual nine blade variable fans which keep the temperature at 25 degrees. This miner was developed with Samsung. After landing a deal with the South Korean tech giant, Halong Mining poses as a viable competitor to Bitmain.

    ASIC Miner the Best Crypto Mining 2
    AvalonMiner 821 was officially revealed by Canaan Creative last December after the success of its previous-generation AvalonMiner 741. This miner has a hashrate of 11TH/s. Unlike DragonMint T1, AvalonMiner 821 only has one cooler, but it still provides the owner with a substantial level of cooling. Furthermore, the miner is resistant to different temperatures.

    This ASIC miner is absolutely compatible with huge mining pools like Nicehash.com, Slushpool.com.

    AvalonMiner 821 trails Antminer S9s by 10 percent in terms of mining efficiency. It is still a viable option for those who want to save some cash. It currently costs around $700. While you still have to buy a $200 PSU for this miner, a total of roughly $900 is still less than Antminer S9.

    The bottom line

    Where is this ASIC race going?

    In this article, we are focusing on the developments in Bitcoin (SHA256) mining ASICs but the mining race is much bigger. All the companies that have entered the Bitcoin mining race will expand to other hashing algorithms to maximize their profit and market share.

    A lot of cash is investing in this race. All because of the expectation that the number of mining hardware companies will only grow. Some of the large semiconductor companies may enter the race too. It won’t be a surprise if they direct some of their teams’ design capabilities to design and fabricate ASIC mining chips. And it is quite likely that every major ASIC manufacturer already has a new 7nm ASIC up its sleeve.

    ASIC mining is a huge global industry, so large mining farms are willing to pay millions in order to have a sneak peek of exclusive miners.

    Risk Disclosure (read carefully!)

  • Mining with GPU versus CPU

    Mining with GPU versus CPUBoth CPUs and GPUs are inventions made from billions of microscopic transistors packed on a small piece of silicon. But they have some differences.

    By Traders-Paradise Team

    To find the answer, we must first look into how mining works. A computer guesses a string of characters and puts them through a hash function to try to reach an expected hash output. However, the computer has no way of knowing how to get to that output. Let’s say the output needed is “6”. The computer doesn’t know what calculations are used to generate the output; it could be 3+3, 5+1, 6+0, 3×2, and a nearly limitless number of other functions. Once the computer has found an input string that works, it can be easily verified by the other computers.

    Go back to CPU and GPU!

    A CPU is great for multitasking, such as saving documents, editing video, deciphering instructions, running the OS, and much more. However, because it needs to figure out what to do each time, it is a lot slower than a GPU. Think of a Swiss knife. The knife itself may not be very useful, but it has a lot of different tools attached.

    What is CPU

    The CPU, or central processing unit, is the part of the computer that performs the will of the software loaded on the computer. It’s the main executive for the entire machine. It is the master that tells all the parts of the computer what to do – in accordance with the program code of the software, and, hopefully, the will of the user. They are designed to perform very complexly, and often changing in the mid-stride, operations. Most computers have multi-core CPUs nowadays (which is almost the same thing as having multiple CPUs in a single physical package), and some computers even have multiple CPUs.

    The CPU is usually a removable component that plugs into the computer’s main circuit board, or motherboard and sits underneath a large, metallic heat sink which usually has a fan, and few are cooled by water.

    What is GPU

    The GPU, or graphics processing unit, is a part of the computer for the video rendering system. The typical function of a GPU is to assist with the rendering of 3D graphics and visual effects so that the CPU doesn’t have to. Powerful GPUs are needed mostly for graphics-intensive tasks such as gaming or video editing.

    These days, miners are moving quickly to GPU because when GPU was discovered it was said that, it could offer more hash power compared to CPUs, its cost is lower and can save electricity.

    Why mining with GPU

    A CPU is designed primarily to be an executive and make decisions, as directed by the software. For example, if you type a document and save it, it is the CPUs job to turn your document into the appropriate file type and direct the hard disk to write it as a file.

    CPUs can also do all kinds of math, as inside every CPU is one or more “Arithmetic/Logic Units” (ALUs). CPUs are also highly capable of following instructions of the “if this, do that, otherwise, do something else”. A large bulk of the structures inside a CPU are concerned with making sure that the CPU is ready to deal with having to switch to a different task on a moment’s notice when needed.

    Differences

    A GPU is very different. Yes, a GPU can do the math, and can also do “this” and “that” based on specific conditions. However, GPUs have been designed so they are very good at doing video processing, and less executive work. They are designed to do a high number of simpler operations than CPU and to do them quickly.

    GPUs have large numbers of ALUs, more so than CPUs. While CPUs can have up to a handful, modern GPUs have between 1.500 and 2.800 ALU. As a result, they can do large amounts of bulky mathematical labor in a greater quantity than CPUs.

    That, in a nutshell, is why GPUs can mine Bitcoins so much faster than CPUs. Bitcoin mining requires no decision making, it is repetitive mathematical work for a computer. While CPU can do these calculations one or a few at the time, GPU can do more than a thousand at the same time. The only decision making that must be made in Bitcoin mining is, “do I have a valid block” or “do I not”. That’s an excellent workload to run on a GPU.

    GPU can mine much faster than CPU. In order to mine Bitcoin, you must have at least one GPU installed on your computer.
    Also, GPU has the ability to mine different coins such as Ethereum, Bitcoin Gold, and many others besides Bitcoin.

    Why mining with GPU?

    GPU is very good at complex computation, is easily sourced, is standardized hardware, has high resale value.and is easily upgradeable. A GPU is great at doing the same thing over and over again: producing graphics. Normally, this involves performing a mathematical equation with two or more numbers that give an output that is rendered as a pixel. Sounds familiar?

    That’s because it is. This task is exactly like mining – putting a set of inputs through the same function. Because of GPUs when mining has to do this one thing, they can do it very fast. And can do a high volume of these operations, just like drawing a high number of pixels on your screen.

    The choice of CPU in a crypto mining setup doesn’t matter that much because it is only doing telling everything what to do, which isn’t that much of a workload.

     

    The GPUs are the ones doing the heavy lifting. The choice of which GPUs to use is important because you want the best hashing performance.  And you are limited as to how many GPUs you can connect in a rig as each GPU requires at least a single PCIe slot.

    Thus it is important to choose the motherboard carefully as they can come equipped with between one and six PCIe slots.

    Luckily, those slots do not have to be of the x16/x8 kind, and x1 suffice well enough. Hashing performance is often rated at hashes per watt given that electricity is your largest cost after the initial investment in a mining rig.

    Why mine with CPU?

    At the point when Bitcoin was begun, the only way to mine was utilizing Central Processing Unit (CPU) on PC and Bitcoin core wallet. Intel and AMD were the famous names in CPUs. When bitcoin was released you could dig only 100 coins a day using CPU. But it is impossible today to CPU mine bitcoin because of much higher difficulty which gave rise to ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit). Specially designed chips just for mining of a one or the other cryptocurrency.

    CPU was designed to switch between different complex tasks. Hash required proof of work in not very complex mathematical calculations.  And CPU has less arithmetic logical units. So, when it comes to performance in the large calculation CPU is relatively slow. CPU has the ability to mine different coins such as Zcash, Nexus, Hold coin, Reicoin.

    Advantages of CPU mining: there is no specialized hardware required, a very good starting point to enter mining, invaluable educational experience. And it is fun to mine with CPU.

    The bitcoin network hash rate is really high, so in CPU mining there is no longer a guarantee for profit. During the mining process, the miners use fast running hardware to try to solve blocks. And slow CPU hardware can only make a certain amount of hashes in a given time frame. You need very good and fastest hardware for faster hashes.

    Both CPUs and GPUs are creations made from billions of microscopic transistors crammed on a small piece of silicon.
    Trying different hashes repeatedly is a very repetitive task suitable for a GPU. Each attempt varying only by the changing of one number (called a “nonce”) in the data being hashed.

    That is why GPUs can mine Bitcoins so much faster than CPUs. Bitcoin mining requires no complex decision making because it is repetitive mathematical work on the same set of numbers. The only decision making that must be made in Bitcoin mining is, “do I have a valid block” or “do I not”. That’s an excellent workload to run on a GPU which can do a high number of these calculations at the same time.