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TNW uses cookies to personalize content and ads to make our site easier for you to use. Bitcoin mining was once nothing more than a lucrative hobby for nerdy cryptocurrency enthusiasts. The only hardware required, in the beginning, was a simple computer. Things have changed a lot in less than 10 years. If you had a couple computers lying around with decent specs you could have earned about five dollars a day. The difficulty of mining amount of computing power necessary was so low then it was worth it for hobbyists and crypto nerds to participate.
It was a strange time where people used GPUs to play video games, instead of playing them with cardboard like we do in the present. I like having left over pizza to nibble on later.
You can make the pizza yourself and bring it to my house or order it for me from a delivery place …. More importantly, in October the code for mining bitcoin with GPUs was released to the general public.
As mining difficulty rose so did the need for better, more dedicated hardware. GPUs were up to the task. Mining bitcoin on a single GPU took very little technical skill. Nearly anyone with a few hundred bucks could could do it, and computational requirements were still low enough to make it worthwhile.
That would quickly change however, as cryptocurrency began to catch on the community started to get some big ideas on mining hardware. Efforts to scale hash rates through GPUs pushed the limits of consumer computing in novel ways. Finally, there was a way for the little people to make money using the magic of cryptography and blockchain.
It was time for everyone to quit their jobs, plug in a bunch of fairly-affordable mining rigs, and drink pina coladas on the beach. Except mining difficulty continued to rise, and with it, the power requirements would soon become too steep for your average hobbyist to make any money.
Mining began to scale once FPGAs were modified for the purpose. The biggest draw to this hardware was the fact that it used three times less power than simple GPU setups to effectively accomplish the same task.
Yet, if you were an independent miner in who enjoyed your GPU setup, the writing was on the wall. This is why ASIC miners remain the standard.
But, for those who can afford it, the lure of bitcoin mining continues to prove lucrative — at least for hardware manufacturers. Published February 2, — February 2, — Meet the first bitcoin miner: Single GPU bitcoin mining?
The only way to earn an 8. This is what people who disarm bombs see in their nightmares. Tristan Greene February 2, —