Bitcoin Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples - v1.06, by Herong Yang
Bitcoin Mining Machine - "Miner"
This section describes what is a Bitcoin mining machine - Miner.
From the previous section, we learn that our laptops are too slow for mining blocks. So we have to purchase special Bitcoin mining machines called "Miners" to be able to mine Bitcoins.
Here are some examples of Miners available on the market:
1. Antminer S9, also called ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) Mining Rig - Made by Bitmain from China.
Antminer S9 is special computer designed to just perform SHA256 operations with a performance of 14 TH/s. That is 3,500,000 times faster than our laptop computer.
With a performance of 14 TH/s, a single Antminer S9 miner still needs 18 years to hash a single block:
8 ZH / (14 TH /second) = 8,000,000,000 TH / (14 TH /second) = 571,428,571 seconds = 9,523,810 minutes = 158,730 hours = 6,614 days = 18 years.
2. AvalonMiner 741 - Made by Canaan from China.
AvalonMiner 741 is special computer designed to just perform SHA256 operations with a performance of 7.3 TH/s. That is 1,750,000 times faster than our laptop computer.
With a performance of 7.3 TH/s, a single AvalonMiner 741 miner still needs 35 years to hash a single block:
8 ZH / (7.3 TH /second) = 8,000,000,000 TH / (7.3 TH /second) = 1,095,890,411 seconds = 18,264,840 minutes = 304,414 hours = 12,684 days = 35 years.
Below is a picture of Antminer S9 and AvalonMiner 741 miners:
Table of Contents
Computation Effort of Bitcoin Mining
►Bitcoin Mining Machine - "Miner"