Bitcoin hash-rate exceeds total computing power of all the world’s computers
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Re: Bitcoin hash-rate exceeds total computing power of all the world’s computers
#2This is not at all surprising. A lot of the machines on the Bitcoin network are ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Chip), which are extremely good at doing one thing: calculating SHA256(SHA256(x)). You can't use them for anything else, so it's a little unfair to compare them to personal computers.
Nitpicks aside, though, the Bitcoin network's hashrate is mindblowing.
Re: Bitcoin hash-rate exceeds total computing power of all the world’s computers
#3[deleted]
Re: Bitcoin hash-rate exceeds total computing power of all the world’s computers
#4Very worrying. The environmental impacts of Bitcoin are absolutely horrendous.
Re: Bitcoin hash-rate exceeds total computing power of all the world’s computers
#5It's such a waste of computing power.
Re: Bitcoin hash-rate exceeds total computing power of all the world’s computers
#6Very worrying. The environmental impacts of Bitcoin are absolutely horrendous.
ASIC's consume very little power compared to a PC. One watt per gigahash is a rough value, although most promise quite a bit less. You'd need about 100 PC's, at 300W each, to produce a gigahash, using the assumptions in this article.
Re: Bitcoin hash-rate exceeds total computing power of all the world’s computers
#7This isn't the completely worthless observation it appears (like, for example, the snarky retort that Babbage's difference engine outpowers all the world's Bitcoin ASICs put together, on a decimal arithmetic benchmark). The Bitcoin ASIC network is a modest amount of equipment: in dollars, watts, or transistors, about the size of a one supercomputer from the TOP500. So this really underscores that general-purpose PCs are terrible at very simple & very parallel problems.
Adding a FPGA to the CPU/GPU mix could narrow the gap:
Re: Bitcoin hash-rate exceeds total computing power of all the world’s computers
#8What a waste of time. I haven't given too much weight to criticism of Bitcoin's use of computing resources--there's enough low-hanging fruit--but this is actually somehow reprehensible.
Re: Bitcoin hash-rate exceeds total computing power of all the world’s computers
#9Very worrying. The environmental impacts of Bitcoin are absolutely horrendous.
How much energy, resources, etc are required to sustain cash and credit card transactions? Think of all those banks, skyscrapers, ATMs, computers, money printing machines. All of those things exist to power the security of the modern financial industry.
If bitcoin powers the post-modern financial industry, the resource savings will be enormous.
Re: Bitcoin hash-rate exceeds total computing power of all the world’s computers
#10It's such a waste of computing power.
Mining is what makes the bitcoin network secure. The higher the hashrate, the more secure the bitcoin network. As I mentioned in another comment, if you compare the resources required to secure the bitcoin network vs the resources required to secure any other financial networks, it's miniscule.