ASIC mining

[waggythegeek]

So I kinda wanna get into mining, but get tge message that its futile unless i have an ASIC. However, idfk what that means. Can someone enlighten me as to what an ASIC is, where/how i would buy/make one, and how technical it is to use?

[Vivilacqua1]

Its a special expensive card that's only used for coin mining.

 

[Moonzy]

ASIC cards are specialised cards meant for mining purposes

they're magnitudes faster than any gpu or cpu, depending on what you're looking at

the power consumption is less too so you'll benefit more in term of power

 

but some currency cant be mined with ASIC cards, so just be wary of this

ie:

Bitcoin = Asic mine-able

Litecoin = cant be mined by ASIC cards

 

Pros of ASIC card:

mines waaaay faster

 

cons of ASIC card:

can only be used for mining while gpu and cpu can do other stuffs

 

i suggest you do more research about this before investing, like RoI and what not, i did some poking into this waaay back, so my information might not be that accurate anymore

[RedWulf]

anything from a 30USD usb dongle(crap) to a 2,000USD machine that runs 7Th/s and an insane power demand

you want at least like 20 gigahashes/sec but its really about keeping the hash rate high enough to justify the power demand and still not ruin yourself on the machine cost

[wich23]

Firstly, they aren't cards. Secondly, try asking and/or looking on Bitcointalk.org for more information.

On 2016-04-24 at 5:44 PM, Moonzy said:

but some currency cant be mined with ASIC cards, so just be wary of this

ie:

Bitcoin = Asic mine-able

Litecoin = cant be mined by ASIC cards

This is incorrect, Litecoin can be mined with ASICs aswell. ASIC is an acronym for Application Specific Integrated Circuit.There are many types of ASICs that work for different things, but they can only be used for one specific purpose. The coins use Hashing Algorithms to determine who gets coins, Bitcoin uses SHA-256, and Litecoin uses Scrypt (Aswell as Dogecoin), SHA-256 ASICs can't mine Scrypt coins, and Scrypt ASICs can't mine SHA-256 Coins.