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.

Source: www.geek.com