The act of mining Bitcoin involves computers around the world participating in a competition to solve difficult mathematical problems, where only the first person to solve the problem receives a reward.

What is that mathematical problem? It is more like a puzzle that is found randomly rather than calculated to match an answer.

Calculations are continuously input until the correct hash value is achieved. The number of calculations performed by Bitcoin mining equipment per second is called hash, and no matter how hard a personal computer tries, it is like a grain of sand compared to ASIC dedicated mining machines.

In the past, it was possible to mine with GPUs, but now the competition is at the level of hundreds of terahashes (Terahash) and petahashes (Petahash) per second, making it a battle that ordinary PCs cannot enter. To put it simply, it is like trying to dig for gold with a shovel while thousands of excavators and massive mining factories compete next to you.

As the amount of calculations has dramatically increased, electricity consumption has also exploded. To mine Bitcoin, a combination of "computational power + electricity battle + equipment competition" is at play, and in this process, an interesting beneficiary has emerged: graphics cards, and Nvidia, which has become the king of AI semiconductors.

The reason Nvidia has thrived as it has is not simply because it makes good GPUs. The initial mining boom for Bitcoin dramatically increased the demand for GPUs, leading to a phenomenon where miners swept up the graphics cards that gamers wanted to buy. From this point on, GPUs began to be recognized not just as gaming components, but as money-making tools with immense computational power.

This experience signaled an important market shift for Nvidia: the fact that "computational power is an asset." After the center of mining shifted from GPUs to ASICs, other companies narrowed their view of the GPU market back to gaming, claiming that mining demand had decreased, but Nvidia was different.

Based on the experience gained from mining demand, Nvidia accurately read that GPUs could be used in new markets. Those markets include artificial intelligence, machine learning, autonomous driving, and data centers, all of which require high-level computations.

AI learning is also a task that involves performing an enormous amount of calculations repeatedly, similar to Bitcoin mining. The process of calculating millions of massive data sets simultaneously and finding patterns aligns perfectly with the structure of GPUs. If CPUs are like honor students solving problems one line at a time, GPUs are more like a genius army solving problems simultaneously.

Nvidia has connected this multi-processing characteristic across the entire AI industry, and now AI research labs and big tech companies have entered an era where "development itself is impossible without GPUs." If Bitcoin mining temporarily increased the value of GPUs, the AI industry has made the value of GPUs a "permanent core resource."

Moreover, Nvidia is not just a hardware company. It has created a proprietary development platform called CUDA, ensuring that all AI developers using GPUs cannot escape Nvidia's ecosystem. Just as a smartphone operating system dominates an ecosystem, Nvidia has encroached upon the software foundation of the GPU market. Therefore, even if another company makes similar chips, AI development is impossible without CUDA, making it difficult to catch up. Ultimately, Nvidia controls all three aspects of "hardware + software + development ecosystem," becoming an essential infrastructure company in the AI era, surpassing semiconductor companies.

In summary, mining Bitcoin requires computational power that is literally beyond imagination, and thanks to that, GPUs have proven the value of computational resources. The demand for GPUs that shone brightly in the mining market has provided Nvidia with the capital, philosophy, and technological strategy to build an AI empire.

Today, Nvidia has claimed the throne of the future era within the legacy left by Bitcoin mining. It seems that technology that excels in calculations ultimately changes the power dynamics of the world.