🍯 [Analysis] A Brief History of Cryptocurrency Mining: From Laptops to ASIC Farms

Crypto mining has gone through four distinct phases in what Satoshi Nakamoto knowingly foresaw as a Bitcoin's ($BTC) "mining arms war." The Genesis Block mined by Satoshi used basic CPU processing power that could muster only about one block per 50 minutes. Satoshi knew mining could easily be overtaken by GPUs, mentioning the possibility on Bitcoin Talk in 2010. As word grew, GPU mining took over in 2011, accelerating after a Bitcoin Talk user Puddinpop open sourced the GPU mining code. During this time one miner, ArtForz, grew to control some 20% of the hash rate with a homebuilt GPU rig. FPGAs came next in 2011-2012, but were short lived due to difficulties working with Bitcoin's SHA-256 script. Finally came ASICs, with the first model capable of mining 60 GH/s compared to 1 GH/s of output from GPUs. Over time AISCs moved mining from a hobby to a profession with farm mining businesses like Bitmain and newer rigs running at over 200 times what the earliest ASICs could do.