14 DAY TRIAL // Cryptographic currency kind of suck up on the world, a virtual currency that has value in the real world (some websites sell items and accept Bitcoin), so Biostar made a series of motherboards meant to mine for such coins.
Normally, to mine for Bitcoins, successfully anyhow, you need a strong graphics card, preferably an AMD Radeon HD one.
We could go into a lot of details about how crypto currency mining works, but there are many guides for that. Suffice to say that you need a basic software tool (like GUIMiner), and a Bitcoin wallet (an encrypted online bank account) to hold your earnings.
The graphics cards are needed because their parallel processing capabilities (number crunching) allow miners to unlock “virtual padlocks” where all Bitcoins are stored after they are used in a transaction.
Right now, it takes around 1,789,546,951.05 attempts to find the correct key, and success means that you get 25 bitcoins (the reward will halve every four years until all 21 million Bitcoins are found).
Anyway, BIOSTAR wanted to make it easier for people to mine for Bitcoins, so it is preparing the BTC-24GH, which has 64 ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits).
Those ASICs are the equivalent of thirty AMD Radeon HD 7970 video cards. The motherboard will be possible to use in a “ mining rig” (a computer that only mines crypto currencies) and normal gaming and web systems (which can still mine coins part-time).
BIOSTAR also wants to build professional mining operation sites in certain countries. No doubt, this will accelerate the discovery of all Bitcoins significantly.
At the current rate of mining, all Bitcoins will be discovered by 2014, but with what Biostar just did, we can't be sure it will take so long anymore. Especially since its move might be mirrored by other mainboard makers sooner or later.
ASICs are only good at solving mathematical functions, but their expertise comes with the benefit for low power usage.
From what we can see in the pictures, the Biostar “motherboard” looks like a pair of printed circuit boards that mount one above the other and need to link up with a more traditional-looking setup in order to do their job.
You should probably not expect much grace or physical allure from the hardware, since it's not going to fit inside any conventional case. You'll probably have to spread the entire test bench over a table or desk and leave it there.
