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Serious question. How much Bitcoin could you mine on this supercomputer? Given that you don't have to pay for hardware or electricity, I imagine it would be com
by pdog 14y ago
Serious question. How much Bitcoin could you mine on this supercomputer? Given that you don't have to pay for hardware or electricity, I imagine it would be competitive with the fastest GPU, FPGA and ASIC miners.
- Xcelerate 14y agoIt wouldn't be as much as you'd think. For one thing, Titan uses ECC nVidia GPUs, which (if I remember correctly), are NOT optimal for producing bitcoin; AMD GPUs are better. I know you mentioned not paying for electricity, but the power bill for Titan would far exceed any bitcoin produced.
- hn-miw-i 14y agoEfficency is mostly about the cost of the hardware (purchase and running costs), power usage and performance. Purchase, running cost and power usage are not part of your efficiency calculation. ATI cards have traditionally had better hashing (in general, rainbow table gen, jtr, BTC) because they have a larger number of Execution Units per core, however clocked slower, than the nvidia. Higher number of EU allows better exploitation of parallelism important for the performance of hashing. This is the fastest damn computer, its not a brand loyalty GM vs Ford, Coke vs Pepsi, Android vs iOS duality. Oh it's got nvidia, not optimized for hashing. It's going to kick the arse of any consumer or professional grade GPU on the market...
- maaku 14y agoNo, the point was integer-ops vs floating-point. AMD kills NVIDIA on integer-op performance, which SHA256 uses.
- hn-miw-i 14y agoOk well blocks generate at an average of 1 / 15 minutes, so about 96 blocks a day. Each block generate 25 BTC reward. At ~14.00 USD/BTC on MtGox right now that about $34k. So the maximum reward in USD if you could totally control the block chain per day is $34,000. Compare hashing rate of your super computer to total mining hash rate of the btc mining swarm and that is your fraction of 34,000.
- 0x0 14y agoIf the fraction is > 0.5, wouldn't he be able to spoof the entire chain and collect ALL the money?
- MiWDesktopHack 14y agoIn practice you would need far more than 50% of the mining power to take complete control of the blockchain. The greater the hashrate of your miners, the greater probability that your miners will find a valid nonce that satisfies the difficulty equation; it doesn't magically give you the ability to find a valid nonce before any other party. As long as there is one other party mining, there is a non-zero chance that their block will be accepted before yours. What ratio of malicious/non-useful blocks vs valid, legitimate BTC transaction containing blocks would be required before the economy fails, that is an open question.
- 0x0 14y agoThat's for one attempt, right? How often are the nonces found?
- MiWDesktopHack 14y agoThe bitcoin algorithm adjusts the difficulty so 2016 blocks are generated in 2 weeks, so a nonce is found every 10 minutes or so.
- 0x0 14y agoSo every 10 minutes you have a 50% of taking over the chain? If so, sounds like a guaranteed win if you have some time to spend.
- MiWDesktopHack 14y agoSure, but that just lets you set the next block. You can't use it to generate false transactions because no other client would find those transactions valid. At best you can drop all transactions that are broadcast to the network and generate blank blocks, thus freezing all future transactions.
- maaku 14y agoNot much. There was a supercomputer that was just recently dismantled in Arizona and someone asked the same thing. I calculated a gross return of approx. $200/day. That's not counting electrical costs, which will probably put you in the red.