ASCI or application-specific integrated circuit machines have arrived in the Bitcoin mining market. The first machine arrived at a miner’s home at the end of January, and since then reports of shipped ASCI machines finding their way to miners’ Bitcoin mining rigs have been pouring in.

Since ASCI machines are specifically designed for the task of mining Bitcoin, they are very effective machines at what they are designed to do. High-end ASCI machines have a hash rate per second of over 1 million. A typical CPU running Bitcoin mining software has a hash rate per second of 1.5.

It goes without saying that ASCI machine shipping has been a game changer in the world of Bitcoin. CPUs aren’t even compatible with Bitcoin mining software anymore because a CPU running 24 hours a day probably wouldn’t see a Bitcoin for several years, even if you were mining in a pool.

This trend favors those interested in mining who also have thousands of dollars to spend on expensive hardware, as well as early adopters of Bitcoin mining who have likely made huge profits from their early mining efforts. Those early earnings could then be incorporated into the latest and greatest hardware and platform configuration to continue generating Bitcoins in the future.

Miners running relatively powerful GPUs are the most affected by ASCI development. The difficulty of successfully mining a block of Bitcoin has risen to a level that can cause the cost of electricity to exceed the payout a GPU miner will see in Bitcoin year after year.

All this speculation is strongly tied to the stability of the price of Bitcoin in the future. If Bitcoin stays around the current level of $30, innovation will continue to progress. ASCI has partly contributed to the rally that Bitcoin has seen in the last 2 months. The USD exchange rate for Bitcoin has skyrocketed from $10 to $30. It’s hard to find an investment with that kind of return anywhere on the planet, so it’s only natural that Bitcoin is drawing attention in recent days. But will this attention last? And if so, will it bring more scrutiny and volatility than stability in the young digital currency? In the long term, relative stability is the only trait that Bitcoin must establish if it is to achieve its original goal of being a viable and competitive currency on a global scale.

So will Bitcoin transcend the current label of a speculative instrument? The answer lies in a tangle of variables that cover the broad spectrum of humanity: politics, psychology, finances, fear, freedom, privacy, security… etc. Regardless of the outcome, it’s sure to be a riveting spectacle.