What is ASIC miner ?
ASIC stands for Application Specific Integrated Circuit , whose IC (Integrated Circuit) is used for sole application purpose. Think like your computer where you can only do gaming but not watching videos.
Earlier for mining, it was used with general purpose IC which is commonly known as CPU and GPU , but once this Giant hit the market it became difficult to mine coin such as Bitcoin.
Bitmain which is a company in China is the largest producer of this miners. They produce miners for so many coins such as Bitcoin (Sha 256) , Dash and lately a miner which is used for mining Sia Coin - Bitmain A3.
How to buy ASIC miner?
Usually, this comes as a surprise from Bitmain, so I suggest to subscribe to their newsletters and twitter to get this news first hand because this miner will always get sold really quick .
Post Purchase.
Once you have successfully submitted an order and paid the amount which they will be charging, usually they will ship in a specified period of time. Things you might need to know would be there might be additional charges while it reached your home because of customs duty.
Setup
If you watch tutorials you might see it fairly easy plug and play, but you can get into some issues which they might not be explaining. I will try to cover my experience of how it was for me.
You will notice there will not be a power cord available with the shipping from bitmain, so prepare to buy one uphand. You can use normal printer power cord which holds 10 amps. I have bought by mistake a bigger power cord from Home- Depot and had to return and buy a normal from Best Buy. So PLEASE make sure the cord is suited for the power supply.
So Power supply, I brought Bitmain provided power supply, but if you are leaving in US , based on suggestions it would be good to use EVGA 1600 W power supply. I haven't tried yet , but probably I will also follow the norm, but bitmain's power supply does work for me.
Plug in your 10 PSU connecter and make sure your connected to Ethernet and then prepare for huge NOISE.
4 . For beginners you may run into an immediate problem while accessing to the portal you will notice connection refused hence the miner will not be working at this point of time. Solution of this issue could be because of your firewall of the router is turned on. Once you have taken care of it , mining will resume .
- Change your wallet address and pool details and once you have done that you should be ready to mine.
This is was my DAY 1 experience in mining. More exciting and adventurous post to follow .