Following the advent of Bitcoin in January 2009, many were interested in the idea of the decentralization of a currency, as well as an economy model that is independent of government regulation. As such, in those early days, Bitcoin enthusiasts decided to mine the currency and take part in securing the currency's network by creating nodes. In 2010, a PC with an i7 Intel processor could mine around 50 bitcoins per day. That was almost useless at that time, as bitcoin was only worth around $0.08. Miners ended up paying more for the electricity it took to mine bitcoin than the coin was worth.
Using GPUs for mining bitcoin:
With the growth of the popularity of bitcoin and the rise in network difficulty, mining with PCs gradually became inefficient. Bitcoin enthusiasts began to realize that high end graphics cards (GPUs) could process Bitcoin's cryptographic hashes at much higher speeds than CPUs. Starting in October 2010, people began to build mining rigs that mined bitcoin using GPUs. A typical mining rig back then was built using a motherboard, a CPU processor, and six high-end graphics cards. Of course, such GPU mining rigs consume a great deal of electricity. The use of GPUs for mining bitcoin led to a rise in the network difficulty. As time passed, the efficiency of GPUs in bitcoin mining have steadily declined.
ASIC miners:
By June 2011, mining via field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) was preferred over GPU mining rigs, as their electricity consumption was comparably lower. Mining bitcoin via FPGAs lasted no more than a year, as ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) miners were first offered for sale in June 2012 by Butterfly Labs.
By 2013, ASIC miners became the most powerful cryptocurrency mining device on the market. Now ASIC miners were used to mine both bitcoin and altcoins, including Namecoin, Gridcoin, Ripple, Next, Primecoin, Feathercoin, Peercoin, and Swiiftcoin. The first ASIC miner could produce a hash power of around 1,500 GH/second, which was 100 times more efficient than the most powerful GPU mining rig back then.
With the popularization of ASIC miners and the rise in the price of bitcoin, the network difficulty skyrocketed. With this, the mining hash power began to be controlled by individuals and companies which owned huge mining farms with hundreds to thousands of ASIC miners. By 2014, one needed to invest a large amount of money in ASIC mining equipment in order to mine bitcoin.
Developers started to work on creating cryptocurrencies that are ASIC resistant and can still be mined by CPUs and GPUs. A wide array of ASIC resistant cryptocurrencies were created since 2013, including Bytecoin, Monero, Quazarcoin, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, and Bitcoin Gold.
WinMiner was developed to once again decentralize the process of mining. WinMiner's one-click mining software enables users to mine a variety of ASIC resistant cryptocurrencies. It is coded to help introduce more people to the world of cryptocurrencies, as all they have to do is install the software and begin mining with just a single click.
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