With each passing day we are seeing more milestones and anniversaries; it has now been a decade since the first ASIC miners hit the scene:

Bitcoin Miners Celebrate 10 Years Since First ASIC, What Changed Since Then?

As TheCoinDad noted, Vitalik Buterin, inventor of Ethereum, was one of the first to cover the launch of BTC ASIC miners. In February 2013, Buterin interviewed Garzik for Bitcoin Magazine, a publication of which he is one of the co-founders.

Up until the launch of this specialized equipment, BTC miners were profitable by using less powerful computers. ASIC changed and continued to impact that dynamic by forcing miners to become ever more efficient in solving mathematical puzzles to validate blocks and earn BTC rewards, supported by the Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism.

In 201, when Buterin was writing his article on the new hardware, there was skepticism in the Bitcoin community. However, Canaan delivered the first generation of Avalon ASIC models, capable of producing an average of 68,000 Mega hash/second (MH/s) when the total hashrate for the network stood at 22,000 GH/s.

Buterin wrote: “the long-awaited ASICs are indeed real.” As seen in the image below, the first ASICs were similar to desktop computers and, as Garzik revealed, were manufactured in China and could generate $240 in BTC daily, around 1 BTC in 2013 or $23,700 today.

Full article here: https://bitcoinist.com/bitcoin-miners-celebrate-10-years-since-first-asic/