The arrival of application-specific integrated circuits in the mining community has blazed many controversies. Visit the website to get a deep analysis of bitcoin trading. Many solo bitcoin miners who could reap profits without investing hefty capital in bitcoin mining accuse application-specific integration of introducing the concept of centralization in this business. On the other hand, many miners are exceedingly concerned about the arrival of ASICs in the Ethereum network.
Since Ethereum falls under the most profitably minable digital currencies category, ASIC manufacturers are developing Ethereum-centric mining machines. For example, Bitmain has released several ASIC-centric mining rigs.
Since ASICs have disrupted the mining ecosystem of bitcoin, people are concerned whether their arrival in the Ethereum mining ecosystem will do similar to the Ethereum network. So, let’s find out the impacts of ASICs on Ethereum mining.
How can ASICs affect the ecosystem of ethereum mining?
Undeniably ASICs introduce plenty of benefits in the mining industry as they are mining-centric and more optimized for generating random hashes. But with few advantages of ASICs, there are numerous disadvantages of using this hardware in any cryptocurrency community.
ASIC mining plants generate a massive amount of revenue; moreover, the energy efficiency of this mining hardware is way more than GPUs. In addition, the optimized hash generating technology of ASICs makes them superior to GPUs.
However, the efficiency and profitability in the virtual currency mining and bitcoin brought up by ASICs correspondingly bring up decentralization in this business. Undeniably ASICs come with a wide variety of models, and the price range of these hardware depends entirely on the hash rate capacity of mining hardware. Still, these machines have diminished the profitability of bitcoin mining with other devices like GPUs.
The mining community of bitcoin is very active and prominent as one of the famous bitcoin hard forks took place with the help of the mining community only. Bitcoin cash is the leading bitcoin hard fork at the instance in terms of the user base, market value and market cap. Ethereum correspondingly confronted many hard forks, splitting the Ethereum bright chain into many parts.
Many Ethereum miners want the development or mining community to design a hard fork to make the Ethereum ecosystem resistant to the excessive use of ASICs. Since the majority of the Ethereum miners use GPUs to mine these digital coins, they don’t want to buy ASICs for mining this coin as it will require a very high amount of capital.
However, the founder of this cryptocurrency has denied any such hard fork.
Will ASIC mining exert a limited impact?
ASIC mining rig nearly disrupted the bitcoin mining ecosystem as only a few people can reap profits. But on the ethereum network, the impacts of ASICs seems to be very limited. Hashing algorithm of this digital coin, Ethash, plays an essential role in limiting the impact of ASICs on the cryptocurrency network of ethereum.
In short, Ethash is one of the prominent reasons why ethereum does not seem to be immensely impacted by the use of the application of specific integrated circuits. This digital currency’s consensus mechanism is similar to bitcoin, but ethereum has announced its shift to proof of stake by the end of 2022. Proof of stake is a consensus mechanism enabling even personal computers for the mining actions.
Is the use of GPU in ethereum mining profitable?
As discussed above, the majority of ethereum and raven coin miners merely prefer the utilization of GPU for mining actions. Moreover, the utilization of GPUs is exceedingly profitable in such a cryptocurrency network. In contrast to the use of ASICs, GPU is way more profitable. It is because graphic processing units serve the purpose of digital rendering but are also optimal for mining.
When used for ethereum mining, the graphic processing unit guzzles electricity more than ASICs, but the hash rate generated by these machines is also more than ASICs. Moreover, as per a few reports, the subsequent shift of Ethereum to the proof of stakes consensus mechanism, miners will not even need GPUs for mining as this process will only demand CPUs.
The above-listed portion explains some impacts of ASICS on the Ethereum cryptocurrency network.
