Description
Collector’s Item **** Don’t buy with the expectation that you’ll mine any bitcoin!
On May 4th, 2013, a user named friedcat from ASICMiner released the first ever bitcoin mining ASIC USB device on the bitcointalk forums, the Block Erupter USB.
The Block Erupter USB wasn’t the first ASIC miner released, but it was the first ever to use the USB form factor, and used the first ever ASIC chip ever manufactured. The release of the Block Erupter USB comes only a few months after Avalon released the first ever bitcoin ASIC miner to the public in January 2013, and it comes 7 months before Bitmain unveiled it’s first ASIC Miner; the Antminer S1.
These Block Erupter USB devices have a hash rate of 333 MH/s (0.000333 TH/s) and were available for purchase at a price of 1.99 BTC per USB miner upon release. Market value for 1.99 BTC was around $200-$225 USD at the time. Some buyers who purchased early were actually able to make a bit of profit out of them. These are massively inadequate in terms of mining power by today’s metrics. Today, the Block Erupter USBs are technically the least powerful bitcoin ASIC mining devices in the world, since they were the first ever ASIC chips ever created (130nm BE100).
