- What is cryptocurrency mining?
- Types of equipment used for cryptocurrency mining
- How to choose the best equipment for cryptocurrency mining?
What is cryptocurrency mining?
Cryptocurrency mining is an ongoing process of decoding of cryptocurrency blocks. This process is basically solving certain mathematical tasks that derive from the results of previous solved tasks. This is how blockchain is built.
Cryptocurrency miners get their rewards for being the first to solve the tasks and adding a new block to the blockchain. The reward from mining, however, is not guaranteed, because of high competition. Since the reward is only given to the miner who discovered the new block faster than others, it is very important for the miners to use the most powerful and suitable equipment for cryptocurrency mining.
Types of equipment used for cryptocurrency mining
In the past cryptocurrency mining could be performed using only a personal PC, but over time mining became harder. Today mining equipment is powerful, expensive and extremely power consuming. There are several types of hardware that can be used for cryptocurrency mining.
- GPU, or Graphical Processor Unit, or simply a video adapter, is used to mine cryptocurrencies in an old-fashion way. GPUs for cryptocurrency mining are usually gathered into special mining farms on a rack with quite basic motherboards, CPUs, hard drive and power adapters, but with high attention to cooling equipment and internet connection.
- CPU, or Central Processor Unit. Cryptocurrency mining using CPU is also old-fashioned, but it can be adopted for mining most of today’s cryptocurrencies because of the CPU’s flexibility and adaptivity to any processing tasks.
- ASIC, or Application-Specific Integration Circuit, is a device that can be programmed for performing a single task. In terms of cryptocurrency mining, it is one of the latest solutions that allows utilizing all of the available resources for mining coins.
- FPGA, or Field-Programmable Gate Array, is an analog of ASIC in terms of programmability. While FPGA is less powerful than ASIC, it can be re-profiled for performing another task in the future. Also, it is much less power-consuming.
How to choose the best equipment for cryptocurrency mining?
The best mining equipment can be chosen according to the cryptocurrency that you are going to mine.
- GPU is good for mining cryptocurrencies that use algorithms such as Ethash, Equihash or CryptoNight (Etherium, Etherium Classic, Horizen, Zcash, Monero, etc.).
- CPU can be used for mining coins that work on CryptoNight, X11, Scrypt and Equihash algorithms (Monero, Electroneum, Dash, Pura, Litecoin, Dogecin, Zcash, etc.).
- ASIC is most often used to mine cryptocurrencies built on SHA-256, Blake2B, X11 and Equicash ( Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, SiaCoin, Onix, etc.)
- FPGA works well with most types of coins but requires certain skills to adjust it to a desired algorithm.
There is no point in recommending any particular hardware models suitable for different types of mining for two reasons. First, hardware gets outdated quickly as new models appear on the market. Second, today many miners choose to mine for cryptocurrency with cloud mining services that allow you to rent computation capacity you need for certain purposes.