What exactly is an ASIC miner? Read it to find out!

ASIC miners are those who mine using ASIC chips as their primary m31s whatsminercomputing components.

ASIC chips are chips that are designed for a specific purpose, and it ismining app important to note that they are used for more than just mining. This chip is distinguished by its simplicity and efficiency. For example, if bitcoin employs the SHA-256 algorithm, the bitcoin ASIC miner chip is designed to calculate only SHA-256, so in terms of mining, the performance of the ASIC miner chip far exceeds that of the current top computer CPU. Because ASIC miners have an absolute advantage in arithmetic power, computers and graphics card miners have been gradually phased out.

What is the AsicBoost technology in ASIC miners?

Tim Hanke, former CTO of CoinTerra, and Sergio Damián Lerner, Chief Scientist of Rootstock, invented and patented ASICBoost technology. The technology takes advantage of a "vulnerability" in the Bitcoin PoW system described by Blockstream CTO and Bitcoin Core contributing developer Greg Maxwell, which the ASICBOOST creators describe as "a clever new way to handle work items". Professional ASIC mining chips that use ASICBoost can increase mining efficiency by up to 30%.

While ASICBoost technology can be very profitable for miners, Maxwellminer gate believes it can have a negative impact on the entire bitcoin mining ecosystem.

"This could have an alarmingly centralizing effect by robbing other miners of their mining yields. The revenue generated by the secret application of this optimization could be used to distort the Bitcoin ecosystem in order to maintain dominance."

Activating Segregated Witness (Segwit) was previously thought to be a way to prevent ASICBoost. Later, after Bitcoin added Segwit support, there was no mention of ASICBOOST being used in the rumor mill.

It wasn't until September 2018 that AntPool revealed that it had implemented ASICBoost in its mining operations. If this is correct, it would imply that Segwit is ineffective in preventing ASICBoost from functioning.