Home › Bitcoin Converter

Bitcoin Mining Computers

Bitcoin mining network 8 times faster than top 500 supercomputers | News August 31,2013 – 11:03

When scientists came face-to-face with arguably the biggest computing problem ever, they did the most reasonable thing, and asked for help. The result, the famous distributed research network Folding@home, quickly became the largest distributed computing network in the world, according to Guinness World Records — and that was a purely selfless project. What if we let participants add financial gain to the advantages of donating computer time? Bitcoin’s mining “industry” has provided just such an economics experiment, and has led to a network eight times more powerful than the world’s top 500 supercomputers, combined.

Even IBM’s Sequoia, the world’s fastest super-computer, can’t hold a candle to BitCoin

This rather bold claim is based on the FLOPS rubric (FLoating-point Operations Per Second), which is both a decent measure of computing speed and a totally irrelevant measure of Bitcoin mining power. Bitcoin mining works by setting a computer to chew on long and arduous “hash” problems that can’t be streamlined and don’t require floating point operations at all; the whole point is to tie up computer time and make the Bitcoin discovery process time-consuming and difficult. Dedicated mining hardware, which is becoming more popular in the Bitcoin mining community, is intentionally terrible at floating point calculations, making it more difficult to do this kind of direct comparison with general purpose computers.

Bitcoin mining is an interesting mix of the two major models of forcing a distributed computing network into existence: either appeal to the hobbyist to donate their computer’s downtime and extra cycles, or encourage community members to dedicate whole machines to the effort. The former quickly lost relevance to Bitcoin as the mining community grew more organized, more efficient, and more hardcore.There are now “perfect” mining machines built purely to take down Bitcoin hash problems, and enormous mining collectives (called pools) are making such specialized monster rigs necessary for real financial success.

By its nature, Bitcoin mining discards the altruistic cooperation of many distributed computing cultures, replacing it with reward-focused behavior. This means a much higher barrier to entry, but a real incentive to become more invested after first getting involved. IBM’s Sequoia supercomputer, the fastest in the world at almost 17 petaFLOPS, is as fast as about 175,000 modern-day processors, in terms of floating point operations. The next fastest, K, is worth about 100,000, and the numbers drop dramatically from there. Though hard population numbers are difficult to come by, Bitcoin’s distributed network already contains millions of machines, to one extent or another.

Source: wiki-bitcoin.yoyafi.com