The History of Crypto Mining (2008–2026): From Satoshi’s CPU to the ZH/s Era

By CryptomineHQ Redaktion · Last updated July 14, 2026 · fact-checked · Reading time: ~12 min

Crypto mining began with a document, not a machine. The Bitcoin whitepaper appeared on October 31, 2008; on January 3, 2009 Satoshi Nakamoto mined the genesis block on an ordinary CPU. In under two decades that hobby grew into an industrial network approaching 1 ZH/s (a thousand exahashes per second). Along the way the hardware jumped from CPUs to GPUs to FPGAs to purpose-built ASICs, energy use per terahash fell about 97% in a decade, and after China’s 2021 ban the United States became the world’s largest mining hub. This is how it happened, year by year.

2008–2009 — The whitepaper and the first CPU-mined block

On October 31, 2008, a pseudonymous author calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto published “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” The paper described a way to reach consensus without a central authority: participants would compete to solve a computational puzzle — proof-of-work — and the winner would append the next block of transactions. On January 3, 2009, Satoshi mined the very first block, the genesis block, embedding a headline from The Times about bank bailouts.

Crucially, that first block was mined on a standard CPU. With almost no one else on the network, difficulty was trivial and an everyday processor could find blocks in the background. Mining in this era was less an industry than an experiment — a handful of enthusiasts running the client on home computers, collecting 50 BTC per block for coins that had no market price yet. It would not stay that way for long. As more people joined, the network’s self-adjusting difficulty began climbing, and the search for faster hardware started almost immediately. If you want the modern equivalent of that decision, our ASIC miner rankings compare today’s machines the way early miners compared CPUs.

2010 — GPUs change everything

By October 2010 an open-source GPU miner had been released, and it broke the CPU era wide open. Graphics processing units — designed to run thousands of parallel operations for gaming — turned out to be far better at hashing than general-purpose CPUs. A card like the ATI Radeon HD 5770 could out-hash a CPU by an order of magnitude, and miners quickly rebuilt their rigs around GPUs.

This was the first time mining rewarded specialized capital rather than spare cycles. Concentration followed: one early large-scale operation, nicknamed “ARTfarm,” reportedly commanded 20–30% of the entire network’s hashrate by late 2010. The lesson of 2010 has echoed through every hardware generation since — whoever deploys the most efficient machines at scale captures a disproportionate share of the rewards. That same efficiency logic is why we weight power cost so heavily in our profitability calculator today.

2011 — FPGAs and the first altcoins (Litecoin)

In 2011, miners reached for Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) — chips that can be reconfigured in hardware for a specific task. A well-tuned FPGA ran roughly twice as fast as the best GPU while drawing less power, and because it was reprogrammable it sat as a bridge between flexible GPUs and the fixed-function chips that would follow. FPGAs never went fully mainstream for Bitcoin, but they proved that dedicated silicon was the future.

2011 also marked the birth of the altcoin. Litecoin launched using the Scrypt algorithm instead of Bitcoin’s SHA-256, deliberately designed to be more memory-intensive and, its creators hoped, more resistant to specialized hardware. That hope was only temporary — Scrypt eventually got its own ASIC line (the L-series) — but the idea of alternative algorithms and alternative coins was now permanently part of the landscape. Dogecoin later adopted Scrypt too and is merge-mined alongside Litecoin to this day.

2013 — The ASIC revolution begins

2013 was the year mining stopped being something you could do with off-the-shelf hardware. The first ASICs — application-specific integrated circuits hard-wired to compute SHA-256 — reached customers, and the difference was not incremental. ASICs did one thing, hashing, and did it thousands of times more efficiently than any GPU. By June 2013 the network had climbed to roughly 200 TH/s, and the professionalization of mining had begun in earnest.

From this point on, mining was an arms race in silicon. Companies raced to smaller chip fabrication nodes and better cooling, and hobbyist GPU rigs were priced out of Bitcoin entirely. The ASIC era also created the hardware-supply and hosting industries that exist today: once machines cost thousands of dollars and drew kilowatts each, where and how you ran them became as important as which chip you bought. That is exactly the question our hosting comparison exists to answer.

2015–2017 — Ethereum, GPU farms and the mining boom

While Bitcoin marched toward ASIC dominance, a parallel GPU-mining world exploded around Ethereum. Launched in 2015, Ethereum used the Ethash algorithm with a large, growing “DAG” designed to favor memory-rich GPUs over fixed-function ASICs. That design choice kept graphics cards competitive and turned Ethereum into the engine of a second mining boom.

By the 2017 bull run, GPU mining farms were being built worldwide, and consumer graphics cards periodically sold out as miners bought them by the pallet. For several years GPU mining and ASIC mining coexisted: ASICs owned Bitcoin and other SHA-256 coins, while GPUs powered Ethereum and a long tail of alternative proof-of-work coins. This split is why GPU-versus-ASIC math still confuses newcomers — the two have never been interchangeable, as our GPU mining profitability guide lays out.

2016–2024 — The halvings and the efficiency race (−97% per TH/s)

Bitcoin’s block subsidy is cut in half roughly every four years — an event known as the halving. The reward fell from 50 BTC to 25 in 2012, to 12.5 in 2016, to 6.25 in 2020, and to 3.125 BTC in 2024. Each halving instantly compresses miner revenue per block, forcing operators to either mine more efficiently or shut down. The result has been a relentless efficiency race.

The numbers are striking. Between 2014 and 2024, energy consumption per terahash fell by about 97.36% as Bitmain’s Antminer line advanced from the S5 to the S21 and chip fabrication shrank from 130nm all the way to 3nm. The pace has not slowed even recently — a 2024-generation ASIC is roughly 30% more efficient than a 2022 model. Here is how a few milestone machines compare:

This is why hardware choice dominates mining economics. Two machines can produce the same hashrate while one quietly costs twice as much to run — and after a halving, that gap decides who survives. Compare current efficiency (joules per terahash) directly in our ASIC miner rankings before you buy.

2021 — China’s ban and the Great Mining Migration

For years, China hosted the majority of the world’s Bitcoin mining, powered by cheap seasonal hydro and domestic hardware manufacturing. That ended in 2021, when Chinese authorities banned mining outright. More than half of the global hashrate went dark almost overnight, and what followed became known as the Great Mining Migration — a scramble to physically relocate hundreds of thousands of machines to friendlier jurisdictions.

The biggest beneficiary was the United States, which absorbed a large share of the displaced fleet and emerged as the new #1 mining country, today estimated at roughly 37.5% of global hashrate. Texas in particular attracted large operations with deregulated power and demand-response programs. The migration reshaped mining geography permanently — a shift you can explore country by country on our global mining map.

2022 — The Ethereum Merge: the day GPU mining for ETH died

In September 2022, Ethereum executed “The Merge,” switching from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. Instead of miners competing with hardware, validators now secure the network by staking ETH. Overnight, the single largest use for mining GPUs vanished: Ethereum stopped rewarding computational work entirely.

The fallout was enormous. A vast fleet of graphics cards — years of accumulated GPU-mining capacity — suddenly had no flagship coin to mine. Some miners pivoted to smaller GPU-mineable coins, some sold hardware into a flooded second-hand market, and many simply exited. The Merge cemented a hard divide that persists today: serious Bitcoin mining is an ASIC business, and GPUs no longer have a headline proof-of-work coin to anchor their economics. Our Ethereum-mining-after-the-Merge guide walks through what that means for anyone still holding mining GPUs.

2023–2026 — Industrial mining, 1 ZH/s and what’s next

By the mid-2020s, mining had become a heavy industry. Publicly traded companies operate warehouse-scale facilities with immersion cooling and megawatt-scale power contracts, and the network’s hashrate reached the zettahash scale — about 1 ZH/s (1,000 EH/s) at its peak, recovering from around 826 EH/s. In February 2026 difficulty jumped roughly 15% to 144.4 trillion, the largest single adjustment since 2021; by July 2026 difficulty sat near 127.17 trillion (around block 957,963) with live hashrate close to 896 EH/s.

The frontier keeps widening beyond Bitcoin, too. Kaspa’s kHeavyHash algorithm spawned a fresh ASIC class (the K-series) and the newest mining boom, while Monero deliberately stays ASIC-resistant with RandomX to keep CPU mining alive as a counter-movement. Regulation continues to reshape the map: Russia legalized mining in November 2024, and Kazakhstan now regulates and taxes it. For anyone entering today, the practical takeaway is that industrial-scale economics — cheap power, efficient hardware and reliable operations — decide everything. That is why most newcomers now mine through hosted facilities rather than at home, and why cloud mining demands extra scrutiny before you pay.

Timeline at a glance

Frequently asked questions

Sources

Hardware evolution and eras: ASIC Jungle, Startmining, CryptoMinerBros. Network hashrate, difficulty and efficiency data: CoinDesk, Hashrate Index, CoinWarz. Halving schedule and protocol milestones: Bitcoin and Ethereum protocol documentation. Regulatory milestones (China 2021 ban, US share, Russia 2024 legalization, Kazakhstan): contemporaneous industry reporting. Figures reflect data available as of July 2026 and are estimates; mining metrics change with every difficulty adjustment.