ASIC miners
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Well asic is an acronym that stands for applications specific integrated circuit is means it is basically a circuit board designed to do something very specific. it doesn't get much simpler than that well you might be asking, what is the specific thing that is trying to do well it's attempting to solve a blockchain problem we're not going to get into the specifics of how the blockchain works and how to solve it but there are two things that you need to know number one there are many different Blockchain problems.
Blockchain problem
A blockchain can choose any problem that it wants for its proof-of-work mechanism. Bitcoin uses sha-256 and ethereum uses eth hash each of these problems are essentially a bunch of math in short you're telling your computer or circuit board to do a bunch of math until it figures out something and and then wins a reward trying, if you're wanting to learn more about specifically how these problems where we explain with stores how these hashes work and are solved the second thing is need to know is that each.
Problem can be optimized
For example if you think about it on a low level you might find a way to do additional problems really quickly but them. if someone presents you with a bunch of multiplication problems you"ll have to be creative and find to way a optimize, all of those multiplication problems you can't use the same system well an asic is just a circuit board. that has been designed to perform a certain hash which is actually the technical term for the blockchain problem and its goal is to do that as fast as possible and as efficiently as possible as a similar manner.
why is an ASIC better than a GPU
In today's day and age many coins are mined using gpus which are literally the graphic cards and computers. that perform math to display the pixels on your screen in the correct manner well it turn out just by luck that these GPUs are also really good at doing the math for some of the major cryptocurrency hashes. for example in the past few years ethereum has been quite profitable and because of this gpu prices have skyrocketed past their original MSRP to give you a perspective my GTX 1080 ti that i bought three years ago for eight hundred dollars is selling on ebay for nine hundred dollars at the moment imagine, if something like that happened with an iphone it's ridiculous so going back to our incredible hulk example even though hulk can try and may be succeed at growing his garden he would be a lot better off and a lot more efficient at his job if he was instead smashing grapes in the jam it's just what he is good at also if he hired a horde.