ASIC or GPU ?

[Canada EH]

Expensive ASIC for mining asic compatible cryptos

or 1060/1070/1080 and comparable amd

 

https://www.bitcoinmining.com/bitcoin-mining-hardware/

[dizmo]

I think the Antminer S9 is the best value, but good luck getting one. They're really hard to come by at the SRP.

That's what I'd invest in though.

 

If you want a wider range of options and a better chance of ROI, I'd think GPUs would be the way to go.

 

Can the ASIC's mine anything other than BTC?

[Jurrunio]

Asic is better than GPU for mining bitcoin

[Canada EH]

10 minutes ago, dizmo said:

Can the ASIC's mine anything other than BTC?

I got no idea

Quote

any SHA256-based miner like Antminer can mine SHA-based currencies such as Litecoin and Bitcoin.

^^^^whatever that means!

 

 

 

Why cant people copy the pcb boards?

 

What about this one?

15Gh/s for $150cdn or about $115usd. People with 1070/80's are getting that hash rate!

Rev 2 GekkoScience 2-Pac

[mariushm]

The ASICs are specialized to mine Bitcoin and other coins using same algorithm. Few coins are.

A cheap 50-100$ ASIC has a hash rate that's probably 50-100x more than what video cards can do now when it comes to Bitcoin

You simply don't use video cards for Bitcoin.

 

Some coins like Ethereum for example are designed on purpose to require A LOT of FAST memory, which makes the coin impossible to mine with an ASIC.

You can also use the same video cards to mine other coins using other algorithms, as long as you have OpenCL or Cuda you can use the cards to perform computations.

 

An ASIC uses lots of super simple processors that can each work with a very small amount of memory, think of it like 8-16 MB of SRAM or SDRAM or something super simple like that. It works, because to mine Bitcoin, the processor doesn't need more than that amount to store calculation results. 

 

In contrast, in order to mine Ethereum and coins based on same algorithm, the algorithm is built in such a way that every time it calculates something it has to pick some numbers from a file that right now is approximately 2.5 GB in size.  So an ASIC would have to put at least 3 GB of fast memory for each of those tens of specialized processors and you'd have an ASIC with 256-512 GB of DDR3 or DDR4 memory.. super expensive. Not only just the memory would cost, but the chips themselves would be a lot more expensive because they'd have to integrate a memory controller inside the chips which takes a lot more space in the chip and when a company pays to have chips made for them, they pay for the surface area of the chip. An 128bit GDDR5 controller could use 10+ times as much space as the simpler memory controllers, and such change could make each of those individual chips several times more expensive.