16 ms·
Bitcoin Network Speed 8 Times Faster than Top 500 Supercomputers Combined
- jaytaylor 13y agoSeems like another case of capitalism at work.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- a3voices 13y agoI wonder what the alt currencies are up to combined at this point (Litecoin, etc.)
- bigiain 13y agoHmmm, 2 comments. That shows that the computing capacity required to subvert the bitcoin network is significant - even if the bitcoin-integer-calcuation to FLOP conversion is wobbly, if all of the top 500 (known) supercomputers together cant even get close to the 50% of mining capacity required to manupulate the blockchain - that's a good sign, right? But... I wonder just what sort of non-public computing power is hidden inside .gov and perhaps .mil domains… I'd be surprised if "they" didn't have machines/clusters that'd blow the "Top (publicly known) supercomputer" out of the water. Whether "they'd" have the combined capacity of the top 500 or not I'm less sure about.
- DannyBee 13y agoWhat you say about secret sites may once have been true. It is almost certainly no longer. It is unlikely that at this point, the NSA or others have as much general purpose computing power as, for example, Google. Why would they? They don't need that much general purpose or floating point performance anymore, because it's reasonable for them to just fab their special purpose own stuff. I'm sure they have some semi-specialized architectures made for doing their most important analysis tasks very quickly (which may or may not be fast in bitcoin-relevant ways), and for everything else, they have a smaller number of general purpose datacenters. I can't think of any good reason the NSA would have 1-5 million x86-64 computers laying around, instead of 1-4 million more specialized processors, and a million x86-64.
- beering 13y agoWell, you have to have at least a few computers in order to store, index, and analyze all communications in the world, right? puts on tinfoil hat
- sneak 13y ago> Why would they? They don't need that much general purpose or floating point performance anymore, because it's reasonable for them to just fab their special purpose own stuff. Indeed, the NSA has their own fab.
- moconnor 13y agoWithout commenting directly on the fab, any codebreaking hardware could be expected to excel at computing bitcoin hashes. Perhaps more interesting is the codebreaking ability latent in the bitcoin network. That must be a tempting target for a variety of agencies around the world.
- rl3 13y ago> Indeed, the NSA has their own fab. They could always just fab architectures specialized in BTC mining, assuming their fabrication capacity is of sufficient scale to get the job done. I'm sure anyone who successfully performed a hostile takeover of BTC could find ways to recoup the initial investment in hardware. That said, I would assume the majority of their fab output and available computing power is busy with more important things.
- gwern 13y agoYes, they have their own fab, but I looked up what I could a while back on that fab ( http://www.gwern.net/Slowing%20Moore%27s%20Law#fn23 http://www.gwern.net/Slowing%20Moore%27s%20Law#fn23 ), and everything indicates the NSA chipfab is outdated, using very large-size features, and essentially meant for legacy system support - making old hard to replace chips, perhaps. If they're doing anything fancy, it'll be at partner chip fabs... but so many chip fabs have already left the USA that one wonders.
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- rdtsc 13y agoThey way I understand it is that the money is in specialized hardware. Today already using GPUs is counterproductive for mining. The money made doesn't pay off the electricity used. So the era of specialized hardware has come. The .gov or some such entity with large black budgets could be in a better position to spin their own specialized hardware that doesn't nothing but try to manipulate the block-chain.
- maxerickson 13y agoUsing dumb math, using Butterfly labs, it would take less than $5 million to match the network (87000 / 50 * 2500). Titan (the current #1 supercomputer) had a budget of around $100 million. Clearly, the comparison is stupid.
- PeterisP 13y agoFor how long do you need to hold 50+% to manipulate the blockchain? For example, Amazon or Google also hold serious computing power - if they would throw all of it at once for an hour, then it wouldn't be THAT expensive compared to the effect.
- bhouser 13y ago"They" don't need to outpace the bitcoin network at its current capacity. All "they" need to do is add enough network capacity so that bitcoin mining with current technology becomes unprofitable. Then many other players who depend on the profitibility of mining will stop.
- russellsprouts 13y agoIt would be interesting if the bit coin network could eventually move to doing useful work like folding@home does. That way mining would not just be a waste of resources. Obviously, the current ASICs wouldn't be able to switch.
- ricksta 13y agoBitcoin calculations right now is not really a waste of resource. It's used to "audit" the transactions to make sure no one can double spend any money.
- zanny 13y agoThe majority of work done on btc is useless though, because very few hashes end up validating into blocks. It would be nice if all that compute power was being used for some productive use, and you just did a consensus raffle rather than arbitrary hashing to pass out new coins.
- teraflop 13y agoI couldn't find any references to a "consensus raffle" algorithm, but it sounds interesting. Is there a reference you can share?
- kzrdude 13y agoRipple claims to use a consensus process https://ripple.com/how-ripple-works/ https://ripple.com/how-ripple-works/
- sneak 13y agoProof-of-work is not useless if it prevents other, undesirable outcomes that would otherwise occur without it. Make no mistake, though - the large mining pools are the spacing guild of bitcoin; without them, there is no network. Unfortunately they (via their users) would not welcome such a switch after so much time and effort and money has already been expended to be able to increase sha256 speed to the point it is at now. Perhaps this is why Litecoin chose scrypt instead? Regardless, the proof-of-work we have in Bitcoin today is likely what we'll have in Bitcoin forever, like it or not.
- AYBABTME 13y agoAll this energy and computing power wasted creating numbers so that we can use them as a currency. If only Bitcoin was computing something useful.
- jimktrains2 13y agoWhat do you think all those VISA, MasterCard, Discover, and AmEX servers, not to mention all the banks, are doing?
- AYBABTME 13y agoThey're not computing numbers for the sake of computing numbers. Imagine a future where Bitcoin dominates the markets. Then you'll have this whole planet dedicated to the computation of hashes for no other sake than computing hashes. Picture yourself an alien civilization, coming to meet us and seeing we spend most of the energy we produce computing numbers and giving them an arbitrary value. While I think there's a lot of arbitrary stuff going on in the financial world, it's still less arbitrary than computing numbers for the sake of computing numbers.
- richcollins 13y agoIt doesn't just do it for the sake of "computing numbers": https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99631.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99631.0
- incompatible 13y agoI agree with you. The idea of "mining" these numbers using an ever-increasing amount of computing power is simply absurd. They'd have done better to allocate the coins in some other way .. I don't know how, maybe distributed equally among Hacker News readers? That would be as good as anything, to get the system started.
- brazzy 13y agoYou misunderstand the purpose of mining (which is really a misnomer). It is necessary to do a distributed, hard-to-manipulate verification of transactions. Creating new bitcoins is just tied to it as an incentive. "Mining" will continue after there are no more new bitcoins. The incentive will change to transaction fees.
- kaib 13y agoInterestingly the reverse is not true. If you took all the Bitcoin mining machines and made them work on science and engineering tasks they would produce hardly any meaningful output compared to the Top500 systems. The main reason is that Bitcoin mining is embarrassingly parallell while most technical computing algorithms require large amounts of communication. The difference between a Top500 system and a standard cluster is the interconnect.
- richcollins 13y agoWhy is it's parallelism "embarrassing"
- ecdavis 13y ago"Embarrassingly parallel" is a term used to describe problems that can be easily divided amongst processes and require little to no communication between processes.
- Xorlev 13y agoBecause the payloads are tiny and require almost no coordination compared to many algorithms. Machines take small work packets and crunch numbers, then pass back results in minutes. For many clusters, various steps of the algorithms require fast messaging for things like MPI. TL;DR Bitcoin: no coordination during work
- cjh_ 13y agoIt is a common term in concurrency and parallelism that refers to a specific kind of task [1] [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassingly_parallel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassingly_parallel
- PeterisP 13y agoBecause being good at embarassingly parallel problems is not something to be particularly proud of - the real, hard problems (for which the supercomputers are needed) can't be so parallelized, and the performance & quality of such systems depend on how well they can handle problems that need much more interdependencies between computing nodes than bitcoin.
- seabrookmx 13y agoThe author claims the network is dominated by ASICs. Sure, Avalon has made some chips, and Butterfly Labs has released a handlful of their miniature ASIC devices, but I hardly think they dominate the network. FPGA's are still the largest contributors I would think. Funnily enough the author didn't even mention them in his article.
- nwhitehead 13y agoComputing SHA hashes is embarrassingly parallel, but LINPACK is NOT embarrassingly parallel. LINPACK, like many scientific applications, requires a fair amount of communication. Comparing hashes per second to LINPACK scores is really apples to oranges. A better comparison is to simply add up numbers of similar GPUs and CPUs and ignore all the benchmarks. Bitcoin enthusiasts should also consider that the Top500 is not an exhaustive list; governments have much more computational power than is on the list.
- mkarttic 13y agohow would the computing power of botnets compare to this? Granted, its more about network resources than calculations of the bitcoin kind. According to [1], botnets control bots by the millions, and have the capacity to send billions of spam mails a day. [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet#Historical_list_of_botnets http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet#Historical_list_of_botne... edit: grammar.
- DasIch 13y agoIn the case of a botnet you would have to consider whether you go by the number of calculations each machine a bot runs on can perform or whether you consider the number of calculations each bot can perform with the risk of detection remaining insignificant. Realistically you would have to go with the latter in that case I don't think the computing power of most if not all botnets would account for much.
- ck2 13y agoIf only all that cpu power was doing folding or some kind of humankind benefit other than profit, or at least in addition to profit.
- zer0gravity 13y agoBitcoin algorithm should be rethought in order to be used for valuable computation not just useless hashing. At this point it's a waste of energy, but that doesn't mean we can't turn it into something useful. I believe we really need to ask ourselves: "What are we trying to accomplish here?". Are we trying to create just a digital medium that promotes the same old selfinterest, or are we trying to create a new kind of system that transcends the individual?
- M4v3R 13y agoIt's not "useless hashing". The computations are neccesary to secure the network and process transactions. It's not possible to just swap the algorithm to do something entirely different and still achieve the goals of Bitcoin network.
- Nursie 13y agoThe only way using masses of computing power gives you security is by making the 51% attack harder. To me the whole thing is a manifestation of the bizarre way BTC are handed out, by competitive mining. (No, I don't have a better solution, but can't you see the issue here, the same amount of BTC are created but ever more power is being used)
- treelovinhippie 13y agoThe ultimate thing would be for a cryptocurrency to be based on thoughts/comments/ideas, but nobody has quite cracked how to quantify the value of those yet. So the best idea in this space I've managed to get to so far is to have the network process big data to find meaningful patterns. Not only could the value of the big-data-backed cryptocurrency grow in value off the speculation, you could charge companies to upload/stream their data into the network and essentially have a giant distributed supercomputer processing it and searching for patterns. Then share a percentage of any revenue with the miners as an added bonus. I feel we're already at the point where more data is produced than our ability to process, understand and extract useful insights from that data. And the rate at which global data is produced appears to be on a never ending exponential growth curve. So in one swoop you could lay the foundations for a global distributed currency whilst harnessing the collective computing power of the Internet to solve humanity's problems, gain tremendously powerful insights into human behaviour at all levels from micro to macro, make us more efficient as a species and eventually the potential to become the global AI that feeds off all data streams; constantly feeding in, being processed, recorded, analysed, and subsequently feeding the computed knowledge into agents that make real-world decisions and actions. If anyone has thoughts, skills or interest in this... hit me up.
- Aardwolf 13y agoWhy spend so much computing power on $ 2 billion worth of coinage? Isn't the cost of that computer power more?
- brazzy 13y agoNot even close. According to http://realtimebitcoin.info/ http://realtimebitcoin.info/ about 5 MW are used for Bitcoin. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source that would cost somewhere between 250 and 1000 USD per hour. So at most it's about 8.7 million USD (or 0.7% of the total market price of all bitcoins) per year. That's not much at all to support a functioning currency (whose true macroeconomic value is in enabling the exchange of goods and services, not the market price). An interesting aspect of Bitcoin is that the amount of computation it requires is designed to scale up with the amount of available computation power, independant of the amount of transactions. Miners cannot increase the rate at which new bitcoins are "mined" - geting more computation power only increases their share. Thus it makes no sense to spend more money on the hardware and electricity for mining than the (basically fixed) rate of newly mined coins are worth.