ASIC Miner

An ASIC miner is a machine built around an application-specific integrated circuit designed to run one mining algorithm and nothing else. Because the chip does only that calculation, it delivers far more hashes per second per watt than a general-purpose CPU or GPU, which is why Bitcoin mining is dominated by ASIC hardware. The trade-off is inflexibility and rapid obsolescence: an ASIC cannot be repurposed if a coin changes algorithm or stops being profitable, and newer models steadily push older ones out of the market. Some networks deliberately choose ASIC-resistant algorithms to keep mining accessible to consumer hardware, although in practice such resistance tends to erode once a coin becomes valuable enough to justify custom chips.