Bitcoin hash-rate exceeds total computing power of all the world’s computers

http://tarangill.com/2014/02/03/bitcoin-networks-computing-power/

by ubersync • 12 years ago

33 58 12 years ago

jdiez17• 12 years ago

This 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.

smoyer2• 12 years ago

In my top-level comment, I wasn't disagreeing with anything you've said but was bemoaning the use of the words "computing power" since those ASICs are doing computations as well.

martinald• 12 years ago

Very worrying. The environmental impacts of Bitcoin are absolutely horrendous.

quantumf• 12 years ago

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.

betterunix8• 12 years ago

Ah but that's the unfortunate twist. If you can get a gigahash for 30000W with PCs, you would have no incentive to go down to consuming only 1W with an ASIC. You would consume 30000W with ASICs and get 30000 gigahashes.

[EDIT: Corrected the numbers to match what you wrote. It is irrelevant, though -- if you get a gigahash for X watts with PCs, you'll use X watts to get X gigahashes with a 1W/gigahash ASIC.]

datphp2• 12 years ago

If it's true it isn't that bad (yet). 30mn W is like what, 150'000 TVs? 400 cars? A few buildings worth of AC/heating?

I don't think we'll get to a point where BTC has a significant footprint anytime soon.

OmarIsmail2• 12 years ago

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.

nhaehnle• 12 years ago

And yet the actual functionality of Bitcoin - a simple ledger - could be implemented using much less resources than are used to maintain the Bitcoin network. It's curious, isn't it?

CJefferson• 12 years ago

Why do you think banks, skyscrapers, ATMs, computers and money printing machines will go away just because of bitcoin?

They will all still be there, there will just also be lots of machines calculating SHA256 hashes

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

The total computing of the Bitcoin network consumes many orders of magnitude less power than all of the world's computers combined.

sickpig3• 12 years ago

FWIW even the industrial revolution had a huge environmental impacts.

jbb555• 12 years ago

Yeah, best we all go back to caves and lie down and die.

TheRubyist• 12 years ago

It's such a waste of computing power.

OmarIsmail2• 12 years ago

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.

Nursie2• 12 years ago

It's only required because of the decentralisation fetish of coiners.

Perfectly secure systems exist that don't require this lunacy.

ninthfrank07• 12 years ago

What do you think of Nxt? It's 100% proof of stake. http://www.nxtcrypto.org

inoop• 12 years ago

The higher the hashrate, the more secure the bitcoin network.

wat

edit: clarification, the total hash rate has zero bearing on the overall security. The question is about how hard it is to gain majority, in other words, how that hashing power is distributed.

At the time of writing, the two largest pools have 50% of the hashing power: https://blockchain.info/pools. If they decide to work together and perhaps DDOS a smaller third pool, they can have 51% pretty easily.

Inb4 'they wouldn't do that', the largest pool (ghash.io) is known to have attempted double spends before. Besides, surely one wouldn't argue that Bitcoin's security is a matter of confidence in a few pool operators being friendly?

GotAnyMegadeth• 12 years ago

Seeing as lots of that hashing power probably comes from ASICs and FPGAs, if anything it's more of a waste of Silicon that computing power, as without Bitcoin there probably isn't much use for all that hashing power...

betterunix8• 12 years ago

It is a waste of electrical power.

throwaway_yy2Di• 12 years ago

This 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:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1933192

rtpg• 12 years ago

I think it underscores more that general-purpose PCs are terrible at single-task programs.

Helianthus2• 12 years ago

What 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.

MiWCryptohn3• 12 years ago

Hardly a waste of time. You haven't seen this for what it truly is; a waste of time is your cash sitting in a clearinghouse for days before going overseas. a waste of time is any value transaction that takes more than minutes on a global scale. A waste of time is when the authorities freeze your accounts and cancel your cards. Cryptocurrency solves these problems and more.

Helianthus2• 12 years ago

You haven't seen this for what it truly is

Just... don't bother with me. I've been watching this since the first hype and you aren't anywhere near the first breathless comment I've read.

easy_rider• 12 years ago

Now if they would all have been mapping cancer markers and analyzing gravitational wave fluctuations through BOINC ... :( You can only wish..

vidarh• 12 years ago

A huge proportion of the current hashing power is asic miners that are only suitable for coin mining for sha256 type coins.

kubiiii• 12 years ago

Breaking news : a single caterpillar excavator has more excavating power than all the toy shovels in the world together. I still find the approach of the article interesting, but what would be relevant is to compare the power consumption of the bitcoins miners compared to the power consumption of all the personal computers in the world.

logicallee• 12 years ago

I know we're used to reimplmenting PONG at 0.5 fps on an 8088 vm shoehorned into pure CSS around here... (you know you would click)

but this is ridiculous. Personal computers are 3 ghz * 2-4 cores * a billion devices.[1] It is huge!

That's why we can work at layers that are 10 layers above what we're actually doing. Such as a style sheet interpreted by a browser.

Try dropping down to C sometime. These machines are not toys.

[1] random lazy link: http://www.ask.com/question/how-many-computers-are-there-in-...

ck2• 12 years ago

I was thinking the other day, let's say someone operating the bitcoin network wanted to crack a specific AES256 code - couldn't they try to use the network to insert that into different blocks with different difficulties to try to get the network to crack it for them?

Or it doesn't work quite that way?

Would be interesting fiction (ala Cory Doctorow style) if say the NSA created a crypto-currency to make everyone else crack messages for them.

MiWCryptohn3• 12 years ago

Doesn't work that way, bitcoin proof of work uses SHA256 twice, which is of limited value. It gives you a near collision to a double hash. It's burning energy for work.

MiWCryptohn3• 12 years ago

One could make a case that the use of sha256 would drive down the cost of comodity ASICs, enabling a well resourced attacker to use mining hardware 'off-label' to find sha256 hash collisions. Same goes for scrypt, with the adoption of its use as a password store.

aninhumer• 12 years ago

Or it doesn't work quite that way?

No, the work done is very specific. It's hard to imagine a usecase where it would be useful to take advantage of it.

mikkom• 12 years ago

Not all the worlds computers, all the worlds personal computers. That's a big difference.

DanBC• 12 years ago

I got a bit confused think of the set of all the world's computers that didn't include the computers doing bitcoin stuff.

smoyer2• 12 years ago

Well ... except by definition bitcoin is hashing at that rate AND computers are being used for other tasks, so they can't be using 100%. There are also billions of embedded systems that have computing power but can't be used for bitcoin mining. What about CPUs in phones and tablets?

If you define "world's computers" as "desktop PCs" and you exclude GPUs (which my son seems to use to heat his bedroom), then maybe this statement makes some sense ... but it's really a pretty weak milestone.

chrisBob2• 12 years ago

What frame rate can I get playing Portal on a bitcoin mining ASIC? Oh. Well, I am not impressed then.

TheCoelacanth• 12 years ago

Why would you want to play Portal when you could endlessly calculate SHA hashes instead?

chrisBob2• 12 years ago

I guess different people go for different things. I have never gotten too excited about SHA hashes.

bakhy• 12 years ago

i almost broke out laughing after reading this :D THE ALIENS ARE MINING BITCOIN!

ok, now i see the ASIC story in the comments, that kinda helps this have some sense, provided we skip over the part of the text that says "if we estimate"...

but, i guess since i clicked, i loose.

wnevets• 12 years ago

"I would assume that the average"

how very scientific

Bitcoin hash-rate exceeds total computing power of all the world’s computers

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