What is bitcoin mining?

Bitcoin mining is the process by which new blocks of Bitcoin transactions are verified and added to the Bitcoin blockchain. Mining is the reason that members of the Bitcoin network trust the public ledger of Bitcoin transactions even without a central authority to verify them.

Why is bitcoin so difficult to mine?

For that reason, Bitcoin is designed to evaluate and adjust the difficulty of mining every 2,016 blocks, or roughly every two weeks. When there is more computing power collectively working to mine for bitcoins, the difficulty level of mining increases in order to keep block production at a stable rate.

How efficient are bitcoin miners?

In 2013, bitcoin miners started to use computers designed specifically for mining cryptocurrency as efficiently as possible, called application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). These can run from several hundred dollars to tens of thousands of dollars, but their efficiency in mining bitcoin is superior.

Do I need an ASIC to mine bitcoin?

So, if you want to win the race and mine Bitcoin now, you’ll need an ASIC. ASICs that are created for mining are very powerful and fast. They do not do anything else other than mining. If you want to buy an ASIC, you should compare different ASICs using: