Glossary · Hardware
ASIC
Also: ASIC miner, application-specific integrated circuit
An ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) is a chip designed to compute one hash function and nothing else, and ASIC miners built around such chips are the only hardware that mines SHA-256 coins like Bitcoin competitively.
Related terms
- Joules per terahash
- Joules per terahash (J/TH) is the efficiency measure for a mining machine, equal to its power draw in watts divided by its hashrate in TH/s, so a lower figure means less electricity for the same expected revenue.
- SHA-256
- SHA-256 is the cryptographic hash function Bitcoin uses for proof of work, producing a fixed 256-bit output from any input so that the only way to find a valid block is to try inputs one after another.
- Hashrate
- Hashrate is the number of hash attempts a miner or the whole network performs per second, quoted in terahashes (TH/s), petahashes (PH/s) or exahashes (EH/s), and it determines a miner's expected share of block rewards.
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