The Bitcoin Mining Game Has Changed

ASCI or application-particular integrated circuit machines have arrived in the Bitcoin mining marketplace. The initial machine arrived at a miner's house in late January and ever since reports have been trickling in of shipped ASCI machines finding their way into miner's Bitcoin mining rigs.

Since ASCI machines are developed particularly for the job of mining Bitcoin, they are extremely efficient machines at what they are designed to do. High end ASCI machines have a per second hash price of over 1 million. A typical CPU running Bitcoin mining software program has a per second hash price of 1.5.

Needless to say the shipment of ASCI machines have been a game changer in the Bitcoin globe. CPUs are no longer even supported by Bitcoin mining software because a CPU operating 24 hours a day would most likely not see a Bitcoin for several years, even if it was mining in a pool.

This trend favors these interested in mining who also occur to have thousands of dollars lying around to be utilized on costly hardware, as nicely as the early adopters of Bitcoin mining who most likely have made a hefty profit from their early mining efforts. Those early earnings could be rolled into the latest and greatest hardware and rig setup to continue generating Bitcoins nicely into the future.

Those miner who are operating relatively powerful GPUs are becoming hit the worst by the ASCI improvement. The difficulty in effectively mining a block of Bitcoin has increased to a level that might make the price of electricity outweigh the payout a GPU miner will see in Bitcoin from year to year.

All of this speculation is tied heavily to the stability of the cost of Bitcoin going forward. If Bitcoin stays around the current 30 usd level then innovation will continue to progress. ASCI in part has contributed to the rally that Bitcoin has seen over the final 2 months. The USD exchange rate for Bitcoin has soared from 10 usd to 30 usd. It is hard to find an investment with that type of return anywhere on the planet, so it is all-natural for Bitcoin to be drawing attention in recent days. But will this attention last? And if so will it bring much more scrutiny and volatility than stability on the young digital currency? In the lengthy term relative stability is the 1 trait that Bitcoin should establish if it is to achieve the original objective of being a viable and competitive currency on a globe scale.