ASIC bitcoin miner arms race: the definitive CoinDesk roundup

CoinDesk's Daniel Cawrey recently visited and toured the facilities at Butterfly Labs, one of the most prominent and written about producers of bitcoin mining technology. In this second part of this series, he reports on the factors involved in the bitcoin mining arms race. Now that Butterfly Labs is shipping ASIC bitcoin miners at a steady pace, their production plus that of Avalon and mining pools like ASICMiner are causing the mining difficulty to go up quite quickly. What this means is that it takes more computational power to complete proof of work algorithms. It means that a race is....

As we are all aware of, if you want to keep on mining in the Bitcoin universe, you'll need an ASIC miner sooner or later, if you want to be profitable that is. We've been through a passage of USB ASIC miners (the Block Erupters) which are now rapidly declining in price. It has recently come to my attention that there are 2 new ASIC's announced, which are supposedly in stock. That is something you don't see too often (but it has happened before). So let's take a look at these two new Bitcoin ASIC's, shall we? First up, we have the Red Fury USB miner. Yes, that's right, a new USB miner.....

The face of industrial-scale bitcoin mining is changing with every passing month, having already pushed far beyond the bounds once envisioned, perhaps, by the hobby miners of four years ago. The landscape is much different now. Many large-scale mines are shifting from warehouse set-ups to data centers better equipped to deliver the massive power and cooling resources necessary to compete in a steadily accelerating industry. CoinDesk spoke with executives from some of the biggest hardware companies in the mining space. During those discussions a picture emerged of an industry undergoing a....

Review: Rockminer R3-Box 470 gh/s+ Bitcoin ASIC Miner. Rockminer has been putting out miners at a fast pace first starting with the R- Box a 32 gh/s+ ASIC miner. The R-Box was Rockminer's entry-level miner which not only helped them break into the market, and is gearing at the causal miner or someone new to mining. Their introduction of the R3-Box brings Rockminer into direct competition with other heavyweights, like Bitmain, in the Bitcoin ASIC miner market. The R3-Box operates at a speed of roughly 479 gh/s and is aiming at a place from enthusiast's farms to average users who want more....

Blockstream's $210 million raise will play a big role in North American ASIC production and manufacturing.