Mastering Blockchain - Second Edition

Hardware research and development

When it was realized in 2010 that current methods are not efficient for mining bitcoins, miners started shifting toward optimizing mining hardware. These initial efforts included usage of GPUs, and then Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) were used after GPUs reached their limit. Very quickly after that, Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) emerged, which increased the mining power significantly. This trend is expected to grow further as now there is more research into further optimizing ASICs by parallelizing and decreasing the die size.

Moreover, GPU programming initiatives are also expected to grow because new cryptocurrencies are emerging quite regularly now and many of them make use of ...