Bitmain, the bitcoin mining hardware manufacturer has announced the launch of its latest mining ASIC named BM1385. This piece of hardware boasts of over 32.5 GH/s of processing power while consuming 50 percent less processing power than its predecessor.
Mining is a very important operation on the bitcoin network. Bitcoin mining involves a set of computers or processors connected to the bitcoin network which supplies the required processing power to decrypt the blockchain and verify bitcoin transactions. Blockchain is a decentralized ledger that maintains a record of all transactions happening over the network.
Bitcoin mining involves a lot of processing power and the incentive to share processing power is offered in the form of newly minted bitcoins. For every block processed, miners will receive the bitcoin reward. The bitcoin network is growing on a rapid scale. As the network expands, the processing power required to decrypt the blockchain also increases progressively.
During the initial days, the graphics processing units found on computers used to act as miners. In order to keep up with increasing difficulty levels, now we have specialized hardware designed and manufactured for bitcoin mining. These chips are called Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs). There are currently multiple companies that are involved in design, fabrication and manufacturing of mining ASICs. Beijing based Bitmain is one of the companies that specializes in bitcoin mining ASICs.
Mining ASICs generally consume a lot of electricity to produce huge amounts of processing power. This has made bitcoin mining a very costly affair. Bitcoin mining hardware manufacturers including Bitmain are continuously striving to come up with more energy efficient ASICs with intense processing power. The new BM1385 mining ASIC is one of the products of Bitmain’s continuous development efforts.
Bitmain has been delivering some of the best ASICs which are implemented into the company’s Antminer range of bitcoin miners. BM1385 mining ASIC is no different, it will soon be powering Bitmain Antminer S7. What makes BM1385 more special is the fact that it is one of the very few ASICs which will be made available to the consumers. Most of the mining ASICs are generally sold only to businesses due to prohibitive costs and other legal issues.
Bitmain’s BM1385 is just a tip of the iceberg, we can expect more power ASICs to hit the market in the coming days.