The first Bitcoin ASIC miner joins the network

The first Bitcoin ASIC miner joined the network around early February 2013. Yifu Guo, a 23-year-old digital media student on hiatus from NYU-Poly, released the first batch of Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) that were custom-built to mine Bitcoins. 

This was a pivotal moment in the history of Bitcoin mining, marking the transition from previous generations of mining hardware, such as CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs, to the more efficient and powerful ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) miners.
 

ASIC miners are custom-built to do one thing: mine bitcoins at mind-boggling speeds with relatively low power consumption. The introduction of ASIC miners brought about a significant increase in the Bitcoin network’s hash rate, which measures the total computational power used to process transactions and mine new bitcoins.
 

These new chips were capable of mining Bitcoins 50 times faster than the existing technology at that time. This technological advancement made it much more difficult for individuals using personal computers to compete in Bitcoin mining, as ASICs could perform the necessary calculations much faster and more efficiently. The era of ASIC mining solidified the professionalization of the Bitcoin mining industry, leading to the creation of large mining farms and pools.