Читать книгу Cryptocurrency Mining For Dummies - Peter Kent - Страница 52

An ASIC is, technically speaking, an application specific integrated circuit: an incredibly specialized computer chip that is good at doing one operation very efficiently. However, you’ll likely hear cryptocurrency people refer to the specialized mining box they’ve purchased as an ASIC, or an ASIC box. An ASIC is only good for a specific mining algorithm. For example, if you’ve got an ASIC built to mine Bitcoin, which uses the SHA-256 algorithm, you’re not going to be mining Litecoin with it because that would require an ASIC built for the Scrypt algorithm.

Historically, during the years 2013 to 2020, a large portion of global cryptocurrency mining was claimed to take place in China, at perhaps three times the rate of the next-closest nation (the United States). A combination of cheap electricity and easy access to cheap computer components for building mining rigs gave China an edge that Chinese miners have leveraged and maintained, even with their government’s apparent disapproval of cryptocurrencies. Recently, China has gone as far as to outright ban the trading and mining of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, but the fact that the network hardly noticed a disruption during this debacle is a testament to how resilient and difficult to shut down distributed cryptocurrency systems such as Bitcoin are.