Bitcoin Forum

Part of my job is training and Bitcoin, together with other payment methods, is one of the modules I teach. To explain how powerful the network is, I compare it with the most powerful supercomputer. The last time I updated that slide, 2-3 months ago, the Bitcoin network had a "calculating power" of 1700 Petaflops, while the fastest supercomputer (Tianhe-2) had (and still has) an average of..... 33 (http://www.top500.org/lists/2013/06/) !!
Tonight I checked it again (http://bitcoinwatch.com/) and found out it has grown to ... 4327 !! Yes, exactly 4327 to 33..  

Insane..

[edit] that's also a comparison I like to tell to people when I describe what bitcoins are!

Flops (Floating Point Operations Per Second) do not apply to Bitcoin, Especially not since the advert of ASICs.

If you want to do a comparison do it with the estimated power consumption.

That's not a good comparison either, because btc mining gets more efficient. Mining power has gone up by a order of magnitude, but I bet actual electricity usage isn't substantially higher than a year ago.

That's not a good comparison either. I suggest counting the number of startups claiming to be building ASIC-based...  ;D

Exactly, electricity consumption doesn't give any idea about the size of the network, the development of more efficient mining equipment can suggest, on the contrary, that the network is shrinking!!

From my experience (three years now teaching about Bitcoin) I found out that, when you try to explain Bitcoin to someone who has no idea of the concept, even more accurate measures like hashrate don't help them that much.
But when you compare the network with supercomputer and point out the ratio of 100:1 (even if less accurate) they will immediately grasp the size.. it's something very simple but astonishing at the same time.

How many Floating Point Operations you count per one hash?

An old topic (2011) which explains it better than I could do.. but raising concerns about the validity of the comparison. It's funny to read that post today, talking about Radeon Cards... and have a look at the difficulty!  :o

This I was afraid. CPUs doing one independend FLOP operation per tact, and ASICs can do one hash per tact as well. Seems you overestimate Bitcoin computing ability by 12.7K  :o

Someone add this to this list on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS#Distributed_computing_records

Wiki edited. Thanks for the hint!

Thanks for the update!

it will reach way more than this.. i predict over 10x time more

BTW it should be read as 4.32726 exaFLOPS. Is Bitcoin the first distributed network to reach exaFLOPS power?

I think so, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects seems to indicate that the next highest is the Folding@home network, with about 9 petaFLOPS.

Bitcoin network does exactly 0 FLOPS. Comparing int and flops is pointless.

Measuring computing power in flops is like measuring how a car is good in altitude. Pointless, it is not a plane.

Ok who put red bull as fuel in that car?

This is true, however, I think the FLOPS figures are mainly meant to give an idea as to the scale of the Bitcoin network compared to other networks, they are not meant to actually imply that the Bitcoin network does any FLOPS.

But it is hard to make such comparison when ASICs are involved. You could do that comparison with GPU, by checking the FLOPS that the card made, so it was a bit like "if all the gpus were used for flops, then it would be like xyz". And it was a fail comparison because if you did the same with nvidia you would have totally different results despite both AMD and NVIDIA having similar FLOPS per cards.  But with ASIC? They can only do 1 thing.

I think it rather is Monster energy drink. ;)

You are absolutely right, that's why I explained the reason at the beginning of this post: I often need to explain bitcoins in a short time to people who, in  99.999999% of the cases have never heard of it and are usually not very knowledgeable about computers, too. Comparing the network and supercomputers lights their interest up and give them a vague idea of the magnitude of power I am talking about.  Whenever I found an audience of computer experts I wouldn't use this example, I agree wholeheartedly!  ;)
   

TL;DR

Total FUD

/thread

I agree, FLOPS isn't a very good way to measure the power of the Bitcoin network, if we wanted to measure how fast the network was growing, hashes per second would be a better option. I suspect several websites use FLOPS because they want to compare Bitcoin's growth with other networks, and there aren't really many decent ways to make these comparisions (Bitcoin doesn't have any FLOPS, and the other networks don't perform any hashes), FLOPS is chosen as it's a little better than the other methods (such as electricity consumption).

But it is Red Bull wich gives you wings!

Well, other projects too does not use only FLOPS. Every scientific project uses both int and floating operations. Point is that measuring computing power in FLOPS is mostly a marketing things, like when it looked like the performance of cpus depended only on megahertz or how manufacturers try to advertise GPUs by their memory.

The only universal measure is the number of transistors. It wouldn't even be that hard to estimate that if we get the numbers from Avalon & Co.
It's easy to compare to CPUs, GPUs & so on, and it's a "fair" measure factoring in efficiency improvements.

Comparing the bitcoin network with supercomputers is stupid,
Insted you should calculate the cost of buying 400,000 Ghash/s that the bitcoin network got right now:
Assuming that you buy ASICs it would cost you about 20 million dollars.
Lets say you want 80% of the network to be sure you can manipulate the blockchain, it would "only" cost you 80 million dollars, which is a fraction of the cost to do the same mainipulation with super computers. Such manipulation cannot be profitable so only governments would potentially be interested in investing that money to harm the network. My conclusion: the bitcoin network is safe as long as governments and banks dont feel threatened.

Thank you for your politeness Gollum! That's very kind of you, although the parallel I did doesn't sound so stupid to me.
Try and make the example you mentioned to a group of people with an average age of 50 and computer literacy=0.. you will lose them almost immediately. It's already difficult to explain what a "network" of computer is, how many days you would need to get them through hash functions, ASICs, 51% attack, etc.?
As I said already several times, the parallel doesn't pretend to be accurate at ALL, it's just meant to give a vague but understandable idea to the average Bitcoin profane of the size and power of the Bitcoin network.
Anyway that's just my idea based of my experience of a few years of teaching about Bitcoin.

People. People. Calm down. The bitcoin hash rate is big, and that car is on steroids.  :)

Surely the best comparison is to compare the hash rate achievable by supercomputers with the hash rate of the network? Then you are comparing like with like. In other words, to achieve the same computing (hashing) power as the Bitcoin network would require a supercomputer of X (peta)flops.

UPDATE: after just one week, the network has passed 5300 Petaflop (+1300 in one week).

Ok you may not like measuring the network in Petaflops...

here you are, one week ago the network was capable of an Hashrate of 380 Terahashs/s while now it's up to 420 Terahashs/s..
which means an increase of roughly 10% in a single week time..

That's impressive.

Just look at bit operations? Also a FLOP is LESS than a hash so Bitcoin is 12.4 K larger?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6ZklI4D5Ko

With all the Asics in process that number will not look so high.  Let's see in another 2-3 months.

UPDATE: after 1 month from my last update, here are the amazing figures, testifing a huge amount of mining power being delivered in the last few days:

Bitcoin network PetaFlops (even if not appropriate): 5300 to 9966

Bitcoin network Hashrate (more accurate): 420 to 784 Terahashs/s

This means that the Bitcoin network has almost doubled its calculating power just in the last 30 days, or that in the last month the same amount of calculating power has been added than in the last 4 years!

Some people are predicting this to continue for the next two years.

60 days ago the hashrate was 4.5 times lower (http://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?timespan=60days&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=).

Today's news:

"The bitcoin network reached another historic milestone milestone today, achieving an estimated total computational speed of 1 petahash per second (1 PH/s = 1,000,000 GH/s). The current speed is 40x faster than where we began the year, faster than 79% of the bitcoin community expected as of just seven months ago. The path to this point goes back to the genesis block itself and offers insight into the foundations of the world’s first digital currency."

Complete article here: http://thegenesisblock.com/bitcoin-network-reaches-1-petahash-per-second/

This is truly an extraordinary story.

And underappreciated.

In a month we'll be talking about 10000 Petaflops.

Well,  you know there's alot of banking infrastructure that needs to be replaced.

exahash here we come!
 

Bitcoin Network Doubles to 2 PH/s in Four Weeks; the First 1 PH/s Took 4.7 Years!!!

Update 14 Oct 2013:

22,215 Petaflops
2000 PH/s

http://thegenesisblock.com/bitcoin-network-doubles-2-phs-four-weeks-first-1-phs-took-4-7-years/

In mid-September, after 4.75 years in existence, the bitcoin network reached an estimated hash rate of 1 petahash per second. Remarkably, the second petahash took just one more month, pushing network speed over 2 PH/s this past weekend, or 80x the speed on January 1 of this year. This growth is primarily attributable to new ASIC bitcoin miners from KnCMiner and BTCGarden recently being added to the network, and is a trend that is not expected to stop any time soon.