Mining machines are tools used for mining. You can regard these tools as a dedicated computer. The PCs we use every day can help us run various software, open office when we want to work, and open various game software when we want to play games.
The mining machine is also a computer, and only one kind of software can run on it is the liquidation guessing software of the Bitcoin network. Because the mining machine only does this thing, this thing can be done extremely professionally.
Humble beginning of BitCoin mining
In 2009, shortly after Bitcoin came out, any PC user can participate in the prize-winning guessing game on the Bitcoin network. At that time, the reward for each guessing was 50 bitcoins. Now it seems that 50 bitcoins are more than a huge sum of money.
But you have to know that Bitcoin in 2009 was worthless. The first ever BitCoin transaction was a dear man bought a hamburger. with 100,000 Bitcoins. Presumably, those who participated in Bitcoin mining in 2009 were all technical geeks in the early days. They were mining for fun as well. In 2010 when one of my alumni was still in school and exposed to Bitcoin relatively early, he made the most correct decision in his life in 2010: secretly installed a Bitcoin mining software on his minicomputer in the laboratory.
Because the minicomputer has the advantage of crushing performance compared to the PC, he mine a lot of bitcoins in 2010, and have not sold them out yet. The arms race for Bitcoin mining has started since then.
Graphics Card Mining
Starting in 2011, more technical geeks began to join, and they found that remodeling the circuit board of the graphics card from an ordinary PC would have a very high cost performance in mining. This is Graphics Card Mining. The performance of the graphics card mining machine is greatly improved compared to the PC, and it also reduces a lot of unnecessary power consumption, and the economy is much better than that of the PC mining.
Beginning with graphics card mining, professional miners began to appear. These professional miners went to the second-hand market to collect old graphics cards, and then transformed them into professional graphics mining machines, and went to the country to find low-cost power and purposeful mining. Around 2013, I personally participated in an FPGA project. Since the mining of graphics cards was already in full swing at the time, experts in chip manufacturing have also joined in.
FPGA Mining
After all, the main job of the graphics card is not for mining, so there are still some parts in the graphics card that are wasted and not used. For those who make chips, it is a crime to add a transistor for useless functions, which will waste electrical energy, which is money. Because it is too expensive to make a chip directly, these chip experts first made an FPGA in a simulation environment. FPGA can be regarded as the predecessor of the chip, because FPGA is dedicated to mining, so the performance aspect has the advantage of crushing compared with the graphics card.
It is great that FPGAs just came out for mining, but within a few months, a dedicated mining chip came out. The chip is a serious tool dedicated to mining, and it has a generation difference compared to the half-dead FPGA. So our FPGA was eliminated before the cost was recovered. It can be considered that the era of mining with PCs and graphics cards is a feudal era, and every miner can mine on a small scale. When mining enters the era of chip mining, it is the age of empires. A single miner has been unable to keep up with the times, and some miners have gradually developed into group mining, that is, Mining Farms.
Mining Chips
This is explained in detail below. We still come back to say that even if the miners are in the age of empires, they are divided into the steam age, the electrical age, and the information age. The latter ages have a crushing advantage over the previous ones. When mining entered the chip era, mining tools, that is, mining machines, have been evolving. You must have heard of the concepts of 40-nanometer chips and 16-nanometer chips. The so-called nanometer is the manufacturing process of the chip. I will not explain in detail the things in the integrated circuit here. You just need to know that in general, the smaller the chip is, the lower the power consumption. To make the chip smaller, the best way is to make the circuit inside the chip fine. 40 nanometers means that the circuit line width in the chip is 40 nanometers, which is about the minus ninth square meter, and the width of a hair is 50,000 nanometers.
You heard that right, about 1,000 pieces are put together with circuit wires, and there is only one hair as wide as that. From the birth of chip mining, the competition of chip manufacturing process began. From the beginning of the 40-nanometer chip, the continuous evolution has gradually evolved to now that the 7-nanometer chip has become the mainstream. Some miners are still studying the 5nm process. When the 5-nanometer process is reached, the arms race for chips is approaching the end, because the 5-nanometer process is already the most advanced technology available to mankind. If you want to break through the 5-nanometer process and make the circuit thinner, you will reach the limit of the laws of physics. There will be many complex interactions between circuits. It is no longer necessary to improve the production process as before, but it requires physicists to break through the physical theory.
So we can conclude this: Before the advent of quantum computers, our existing chip technology was close to tapping all its performance potential. The cost of chip development is extremely high and the technical requirements are daunting as well. So there are not many mining machine manufacturers so far.
The following 3 companies are among the major mining machine manufacturers:
The first one is the legendary Bitmain. This company once launched an excellent mining machine S9 in 2017. S9 was so good that it crushed almost all competitors, Bitmain once occupied 70% of the market share. Later, as the company's core technical staff left and suffered infighting, and the failure of seeking to go public, Bitmain is not as good.
The second is Whatsminer mining machine. The founder is the technical expert who developed the Antminer S9 mining machine for Bitmain. Because of the unfair distribution of benefits, this expert quitted and founded Whatsminer. This is a new mining machine manufacturer in the market, and grows very fast.
The third is Canaan Creative, the oldest mining machine manufacturer. The development of this mining machinery business is low-profile, and it is currently listed on the Nasdaq. In addition to these three mining machine vendors, there are some other small mining machine vendors with a small market share, so I won't introduce them here. As for the overt and secret fights between mining machine vendors, there are many bloody stories, so I won't introduce them in this chapter. See you tomorrow!
