The Evolution of Bitcoin Mining Machines

In 2010, most mining was done using personal computers. As the number of participants rapidly increased, mining shifted from CPUs to more powerful GPUs. In just seven months, GPU mining dominated the market. By June 2011, specialized mining equipment known as FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) appeared, marking the first professionally designed mining chips. FPGAs boosted hash rates to the GH/s level. In January 2013, the first commercial Bitcoin ASIC miner, the Avalon miner, was delivered, ushering in the ASIC hash rate era. ASIC miners continually evolved in low-power, high-performance pathways, marking the beginning of the high-hash rate era post-2013, reaching TH/s levels.