2.2.0. POW Machines
The mining of gold is done by excavating machines. In the same way, the mining of Bitcoin, which is a digital process, is done by computers.
At the early years, Bitcoin mining could be done on just the central processing unit (CPU) of personal computers. Satoshi, who mined the first Bitcoin in January 2009, did so with the CPU of his personal computer.
However, soon mining became more and more competitive as the demand for Bitcoin increased. Miners started to develop sophisticated computers to give them a competitive advantage in the mining process.
As such, by October 2010, graphics processing units (GPU), often used in gaming, were re-modelled to mine Bitcoins. GPU machines were mining six times more Bitcoins than the CPUs of personal computers.
Few months thereafter, by 2011, field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) were re-designed to mine Bitcoins, and they produced two times more Bitcoins than GPUs.
Thus, the growth of Bitcoin mining was developing quite rapidly as stiff competition kept driving for continuous innovation.
By 2013, Canaan Creative, a China-based computer hardware manufacturer, released the first set of computer machines known as application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) for bitcoin mining. Unlike CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs, ASIC devices were designed at their outset to specifically mine bitcoin.