Bitcoin now world's most powerful supercomputer

[xf2_org]

According to Top500, the world's most powerful supercomputer Tianhe-1A peaks at, if I'm reading this correctly, 4701000 Gflops, or 4701 Tflops, or 4.701 Pflops.

Here are current Folding@Home stats:  9259 Tflops, or 9.259 Pflops

BOINC is 5380 Tflops, or 5.38 Pflops

And...  Bitcoin Watch shows the network hashrate at 53547 Tflops, or 53.547 Pflops.

That is an amazing concentration of computing power -- and it's still growing.

(this thread illustrates how bitcoinwatch arrived at those numbers)

[Bit_Happy]

I'm glad to have the chance to see this develop. 

[benx009]

This is going to sound so noob , but while F@H helps researchers study proteins and BOINC helps "cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars," does all of this computing power behind BitCoin contribute anything at all to the science world (i.e. outside of calculating the hashes for each BitCoin transaction)?

[Bit_Happy]

How much energy is wasted printing and protecting paper money? The Bitcoin supercomputer power is what keeps the transaction chain so secure. Obviously, the money is a means of exchange and people can use it for a 'worthwhile purpose' if they want to.

[unk]

given that calling bitcoin a supercomputer expands the definition of 'supercomputer', are we really sure of this factoid? for example, all the computing power involved in various other high-level tasks (password cracking, web browsing, email, certain very popular and gpu-intensive games) might well be greater. the factoid feels potentially misleading.

(as for the 'waste', people here are too sanguine about it, as usual. we all have to pay for that electricity, and it's not clear in the end that bitcoin will be a competitive payment system as far as transaction fees are concerned; the economic scalability of the model, rather than its technical scalability, hasn't received enough focus - though that's fair because the problems are well in the future and not necessarily pressing at the moment.)

[Maxxx]

How much energy is wasted printing and protecting paper money?

This is a very good point considering this older bit of news:

A significant production problem with new high-tech $100 bills has caused government printers to shut down production of the new notes and to quarantine more than one billion of the bills in huge vaults in Fort Worth, Texas and Washington, DC, CNBC has learned.

An official familiar with the situation told CNBC that 1.1 billion of the new bills have been printed, but they are unusable because of a creasing problem in which paper folds over during production, revealing a blank unlinked portion of the bill face.

What a joke.

[byronbb]

Imagine it in 5 years.................

I love how you put dollars and cents in front of people and things happen.

[Giulio Prisco]

Then, I am thinking of how the computing power of Bitcoin users could be harnessed to compute something useful.

Imagine some opt-in scheme where, if you just want to generate bitcoins as fast as possible with minimal resources, you run the current software, but if you also want to contribute to something like folding@home you run a customized version of the software.

Just an idea, I have not thought of implementation details.

[byronbb]

Could people who wanted to buy computing time send bitcoins BACK into circulation and then the miners crunch their problem and earn the bitcoins? IF not it could be an interesting alternate project.  I know some web flash games use your cpu cycles which are resold by Plura Processing.


http://www.pluraprocessing.com/customers.html

[Zamicol]

According to Top500, the world's most powerful supercomputer Tianhe-1A peaks at, if I'm reading this correctly, 4701000 Gflops, or 4701 Tflops, or 4.701 Pflops.

Here are current Folding@Home stats:  9259 Tflops, or 9.259 Pflops

BOINC is 5380 Tflops, or 5.38 Pflops

And...  Bitcoin Watch shows the network hashrate at 53547 Tflops, or 53.547 Pflops.

That is an amazing concentration of computing power -- and it's still growing.

(this thread illustrates how bitcoinwatch arrived at those numbers)

And the TOTAL power of the top 500 is only 43,673 TeraFlops.  Bitcoin is bigger than even that now!