As a decentralized encryption network, so as to ensure security, decentralization, and anonymity, blockchain must use encryption technology to process all activities on the chain. The so-called mining is a process in which blockchain miners provide encryption and decryption support for blockchain activities and win the reward of ownership of new blocks through decryption competitions. Since it’s a competition, The higher the hashrate miners have, the greater the reward they will get. This situation pushes the miners to pursue higher hashrate and promotes the rapid development of mining technology.
The first generation of blockchain Bitcoin uses the common SHA-256 encryption, which is quite suitable for running with special ASIC chips. The Bitcoin mining machine based on ASIC chip can provide a decryption hashrate far exceeding that of mainstream CPU and GPU, thus since 2013, the Bitcoin mining market has been completely dominated by the mining machine. The prevalence of Bitcoin mining machines also makes the technology of ASIC chip mining machines advance swiftly and vigorously. Nowadays, the latest generation of Bitcoin mining machines even adopts the top manufacturing technology of the chip industry, and the transistor scale can be compared with the top CPUs and GPUs of Intel and NVIDIA.
However, as the second-generation blockchain, Ethereum has also been the second-largest crypto in the blockchain industry for a long time, and its encryption method is special Ethash. Different from SHA-256 used in Bitcoin, Ethash naturally has the feature of “anti-ASIC“, and its decryption process requires not only a high hashrate, but also a large amount of data exchange between the computing chip and memory chip. Traditional ASIC chip possesses a lot of hashrate, but the memory bandwidth is pitifully small, so it is difficult to compete with mainstream GPU. Therefore, the Ethereum mining market has remained in the GPU development stage for a long time, and the network hashrate is not the same as that of Bitcoin: at present, the hashrate of the whole network of Bitcoin exceeds 100EH/s, while that of Ethereum is only 1000TH/s; The hashrate of a single Bitcoin mining machine can reach 100TH/s, today’s 8-unit GPU miner can only provide 400MH/s Ethereum hashrate, and the gap has reached more than 100,000 times.
Obviously, as long as the industry can overcome the memory bandwidth bottleneck of ASIC chips, the mining efficiency of Ethereum can be remarkably improved by ASIC mining machine, which is similar to that of Bitcoin. Over the years, many companies and technical experts have been working hard on this issue day and night, hoping to overcome the challenges through innovative methods effectively and get delectable returns.
Breakthrough–Ethereum Mining Machine Is on the Rise
At the same time that many companies are fully studying the solution of Ethereum mining machines, Ethereum officials are also promoting the construction of a new generation of PoS. Simply put, Ethereum plans to transition from the existing PoW mechanism to the PoS mechanism in 2022. After the transition, the ownership of the new block of Ethereum will be determined by the number of virtual assets staking by miners to the network, rather than the decryption hashrate contributed by the miners. In other words, in the future, there will be no mining activities in Ethereum, and the hashrate competition will be terminated.
Source: https://www.coinspeaker.com/sea-change-gpu-mining-underway/