I heard that miners moved to ASICs to optimize search.
“I heard that miners moved to ASICs to optimize search.”
ASICs do one thing and do it well. GPUs can do many things well.
In the early days of crypto, there was a short period when ASICs had pretty much buried GPUs. But as crypto is a grassroots movement, it didn’t take long for people to come up with new PoW algorithms that were difficult to create ASICs for. Even when ASICs did come out for them, they were either barely more efficient than GPUs (Ethereum), or most cryptos changed their software to make the ASICs useless (Cryptonight, Equihash). New ASIC-resistant algorithms and coins are coming out all the time. Put simply, if ASICs were going to completely kill GPUs, they already would have. The fact that they didn’t is proof that they won’t. It’s a cat and mouse game, and the cat will never catch all the mice. Sometimes it feels like a losing battle, but those mice aren’t just going to roll over. There only are a handful of companies profiting from ASIC mining. Whereas there are literally thousands of companies big and small profiting from or completely dependent on GPU mining. And it runs the gamut from gigantic publicly-owned multinational corporations like Nvidia and AMD: raking in millions of dollars on GPU sales, down to the everyday gamer with a few GPUs. The huge number of stakeholders in GPU mining will not just throw up their hands and cede the entire cryptocurrency mining market to Bitmain without a fight.
https://bitproit.com/asic-vs-gpu-mining/