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identity123 (OP)
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March 15, 2014, 11:50:33 AM
 #1

Hey guys, Bitcoin Noob here. I just had a couple of questions.


1) Why are ASIC chips sold in bulk, and not each one alone.

2) Why are some Bitcoin miners USBS, while others are hard disks

3) Whats the difference between CPU, GPU and ASIC mining and why is ASIC mining the best?

Anyway I'm new here guys so don't hate too much.   Grin
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Rannasha
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March 15, 2014, 12:41:13 PM
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1) Why are ASIC chips sold in bulk, and not each one alone.
Because they are produced in bulk. Producing a single chip is, relatively speaking, a lot more expensive than producing 1000. In mining devices, it's usually more efficient to solder multiple chips to a single board rather than have only one chip per board.

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2) Why are some Bitcoin miners USBS, while others are hard disks
There's no such thing as a hard disk Bitcoin miner.

Miners need a way to communicate with the Bitcoin network. The simpler devices typically do this via a host computer to which they connect via USB. The host computer controls the miner and handles network communication. More advanced devices have their own network port and have a little bit of hardware inside that handles network communication, allowing them to be used without a dedicated computer.

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3) Whats the difference between CPU, GPU and ASIC mining and why is ASIC mining the best?
In general: the more specialized a piece of hardware is, the more efficient it is. A CPU has a very broad range of applications and because of this, it's typically not so fast at them. A GPU has a much narrower range of applications, as it only works well for heavily parallelized operations (in this case: doing the same operations simultaneously for a lot of different input values), so it's much faster than a CPU for these types of operations, but it's more limited in what it can do.

An ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) is built for a single task. All the logic is baked into the chip, rather than programmed like it is done with a CPU or GPU. This means that except for the single task it is build for, an ASIC is nothing more than an expensive paperweight. However, since it's only designed for a single task, it can be optimized extremely well for this task. So an ASIC will have much better performance than a CPU or GPU for the task it is designed for and will be literally useless for any other task.
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