Bitcoin Network Speed 8 Times Faster than Top 500 Supercomputers Combined

Interestingly the reverse is not true.<p>If you took all the Bitcoin mining machines and made them work on science and engineering tasks they would produce hardly any meaningful output compared to the Top500 systems. The main reason is that Bitcoin mining is embarrassingly parallell while most technical computing algorithms require large amounts of communication. The difference between a Top500 system and a standard cluster is the interconnect.

Hmmm, 2 comments.<p>That shows that the computing capacity required to subvert the bitcoin network is significant - even if the bitcoin-integer-calcuation to FLOP conversion is wobbly, if all of the top 500 (known) supercomputers together cant even get close to the 50% of mining capacity required to manupulate the blockchain - that's a good sign, right?<p>But... I wonder just what sort of non-public computing power is hidden inside .gov and perhaps .mil domains… I'd be surprised if "they" didn't have machines/clusters that'd blow the "Top (publicly known) supercomputer" out of the water. Whether "they'd" have the combined capacity of the top 500 or not I'm less sure about.

It would be interesting if the bit coin network could eventually move to doing useful work like folding@home does. That way mining would not just be a waste of resources. Obviously, the current ASICs wouldn't be able to switch.

All this energy and computing power wasted creating numbers so that we can use them as a currency. If only Bitcoin was computing something useful.

The author claims the network is dominated by ASICs. Sure, Avalon has made some chips, and Butterfly Labs has released a handlful of their miniature ASIC devices, but I hardly think they dominate the network.<p>FPGA's are still the largest contributors I would think. Funnily enough the author didn't even mention them in his article.

Computing SHA hashes is embarrassingly parallel, but LINPACK is NOT embarrassingly parallel. LINPACK, like many scientific applications, requires a fair amount of communication. Comparing hashes per second to LINPACK scores is really apples to oranges. A better comparison is to simply add up numbers of similar GPUs and CPUs and ignore all the benchmarks.<p>Bitcoin enthusiasts should also consider that the Top500 is not an exhaustive list; governments have much more computational power than is on the list.

Bitcoin algorithm should be rethought in order to be used for valuable computation not just useless hashing. At this point it's a waste of energy, but that doesn't mean we can't turn it into something useful. I believe we really need to ask ourselves: "What are we trying to accomplish here?". Are we trying to create just a digital medium that promotes the same old selfinterest, or are we trying to create a new kind of system that transcends the individual?

Seems like another case of capitalism at work.

how would the computing power of botnets compare to this?<p>Granted, its more about network resources than calculations of the bitcoin kind.<p>According to [1], botnets control bots by the millions, and have the capacity to send billions of spam mails a day.<p>[1] - <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet#Historical_list_of_botnets" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet#Historical_list_of_botne...</a><p>edit: grammar.

If only all that cpu power was doing folding or some kind of humankind benefit other than profit, or at least in addition to profit.

Why spend so much computing power on $ 2 billion worth of coinage? Isn't the cost of that computer power more?

I wonder what the alt currencies are up to combined at this point (Litecoin, etc.)