The economic performance of Bitcoin is subject to various factors, including market demand and supply, investor sentiment, regulatory developments, macroeconomic trends, technological advancements, and global economic conditions. As usual, I would like to throw out the links to my previous articles on this very subject that I have been writing for some days:
- Navigating the financial revolution: AI, Blockchain and Traditional banking
- Exploring the Depths of Blockchain: Decentralization, Smart Contracts, and Beyond
- Blockchain Network and its Security Issues Underneath
- Bitcoin: Bitcoin Header and its ledger system
- Bitcoin Basic Mining concepts
There is no reason to doubt that Price sentiment and market volatility are the main ones. A miner will only participate in mining if the investment in the hardware, time, maintenance, physical location, energy, and labor is worth the amount of Bitcoin. On the other hand, new competitors of Bitcoin will have to forecast twice more because, the more the value of the Bitcoin goes down or the less there is demand, it becomes more and more difficult to thrive in this environment.
If we look at the past and see how Bitcoin used to be mined using only CPU, then it became more difficult, and consequently, miners went using GPU and now using more modern dedicated hardware like ASIC, we can learn from that in the future change in the new cryptocurrency challenge. As well as new evolutions in Blockchain technology
Here is an overview
CPU Performance:
- CPUs are measured in terms of their clock speed (GHz) and the number of cores.
- Typical CPU mining performance for Bitcoin is relatively low compared to GPUs and ASICs.
- A high-end consumer CPU might have processing power in the range of tens to a couple of hundred mega hashes per second (MH/s)
GPU Performance:
- GPUs are highly parallel processors, and their mining performance is measured in mega hashes per second (MH/s) to giga hashes per second (GH/s).
- High-end gaming GPUs can achieve mining speeds ranging from hundreds of MH/s to a few GH/s.
- GPUs significantly outperform CPUs in terms of mining efficiency.
ASIC Performance:
- ASICs are specifically designed for Bitcoin mining and offer much higher processing power and energy efficiency.
- ASIC mining speeds are measured in tera hashes per second (TH/s) or even peta hashes per second (PH/s).
- Modern ASIC miners can achieve speeds ranging from several TH/s to multiple PH/s, making them orders of magnitude more powerful than GPUs and CPUs.
In May 2021, there was a study showing how Bitcoin consumes way more energy than was expected
