ASIC Miners

An ASIC— or Application-Specific Integrated Circuit—is a circuit that is designed for specific digital applications. In terms of cryptocurrencies, ASICs are designed to compute computations known as hash algorithms. These algorithms are used to build the blockchains that are the underlying technology of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The majority of the cost of an ASIC goes into the design, verification, production, and validation of each chip. Depending on the complexity of the chip, it can take anywhere from a few months to a year to design an ASIC.
The cost, however, is offset by the power that the ASIC chip gives you. To put the power of an ASIC chip into perspective, an ASIC chip used to mine Bitcoin is at least 1,000 times faster than the processor of a regular computer CPU.

You can mine any coin with an ASIC machine as long as your machine is preconfigured to perform the specific types of calculations that are used with the coin that you are mining. However, because crypto projects sometimes fork their coins into new or updated algorithms that may require the use of an entirely different set of calculations, a preconfigured miner will be unable to mine the new, forked coin. However, ASICs are generally used to mine somewhat more common and mainstream coins such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Namecoin.

The nonstop execution of complex mathematical calculations places a high level of strain on hardware, leading to the quick deterioration of your hardware over time. Furthermore, because the technologies used in the crypto space tend to evolve very quickly, old applications often go out of date very quickly, meaning your hardware also becomes outdated quickly. The best hardware rigs to have are those that last long enough to be reconfigured if need be, and those that can withstand the strain of being used for millions upon millions of calculations at an unrelenting pace without breaking the bank in power usage and cooling costs.