The Bitcoin Hashrate is over 7,000,000 TH/s. I have no concept of how large this is, but in terms of supercomputer, I am assuming its large. How large is it, (assuming all the same and modern) how many GPUs are we talking to get this large? It is a power station all to itself to power it all?<p>Then, imagine a world where this could be harnessed, what could this do?<p>i.e.:
* How long will it take to crack a SSL site
* Remember SETI from the early 2000's. I am sure NASA would love this power.
* Are there genome/DNA projects that would take moments to finish rather than years
So, I'd imagine that the bitcoin network is 99.999999% ASICs now.<p>So what that means is that there will be less machines and less electricity used to generate that 7m th/s, compared to GPUs only.<p>Still, it is a massive amount of electricity and metal and man-hours being put to use, that could be on something different.<p>If you just take every GPU and CPU that Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Sun (rip), Huawei etc etc all make, and you add those up, you will get a seriously massive amount of computing power.<p>Check out the top500.org website to see all of the supercomputers out there. They are simulating some cool problems.<p>The bottleneck is software, i.e "what do we do with all this hardware we've chained together"