[2014-06-25] Losing to win

[erono]

http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2014/06/bitcoin

MOST elections, if you win more than half of the votes, you call the shots. In the land of Bitcoin things are a bit more complicated, as events last week showed: although a huge coalition of computer users managed to control 51% of the system that underlies the crypto-currency, the group did not abuse its majority. Instead, many members decided to leave and join rival groups.

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[Bitcopia]

Currently, the computing power on the Bitcoin network is 1.35 zetta flops (sextillion FLoating-point Operations Per Second). That is 5,000 times greater than the power of all of the world’s fastest 500 supercomputers combined.

Wow. Is this accurate? I don't know much about flops and computer power, but I was under the impression the hashrate was about 135 petaflops. Either way, this is quite a massive achievement!

[Massimo80]

Currently, the computing power on the Bitcoin network is 1.35 zetta flops (sextillion FLoating-point Operations Per Second). That is 5,000 times greater than the power of all of the world’s fastest 500 supercomputers combined.

Wow. Is this accurate? I don't know much about flops and computer power, but I was under the impression the hashrate was about 135 petaflops. Either way, this is quite a massive achievement!

Hashing doesn't actually involve any floating-point operation. Measuring hashing power in FLOPS just doesn't make sense.

That said, the Bitcoin network is very likely to be the biggest distributed computing project ever created...