The combined network hashrate of Bitcoin is currently right around 20,000Ghash/s: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ Which is about 2,500X the pro

The combined network hashrate of Bitcoin is currently right around 20,000Ghash/s: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ Which is about 2,500X the processing power of an AMD 7970. Bitcoin is hashing SHA256, which is about as computationally expensive as SHA-1 (or maybe even cheaper, according to comments on the linked blog post). Much of the Bitcoin computational power comes from large mining operations controlled by individuals. Their processing power is easily diverted elsewhere, if the profit motive is there...