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Into the Bitcoin Mines
- applecore 13y agoNot a bad place for a Bitcoin miner. There's cold Arctic air for cooling and cheap geothermal energy for power.
- throwaway_yy2Di 13y ago"Today, all of the machines dedicated to mining Bitcoin have a computing power about 4,500 times the capacity of the United States government’s mightiest supercomputer, the IBM Sequoia, according to calculations done by Michael B. Taylor, a professor at the University of California, San Diego." This is obviously wrong. Where did it come from?
- Eclyps 13y agoI would guess from Michael B. Taylor, a professor at the University of California, San Diego.
- gojomo 13y agoAnd UCSD is home of the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC), a major site for National Science Foundation computing research. So rather than 'obviously wrong' I'd weigh this assessment as 'presumptively right' unless/until other better evidence or testimony is presented.
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- yetanotherphd 13y agoI don't know if it's wrong, but it is a meaningless comparison since bitcoin mining is done with special purpose hardware that could never, for example, run a linpack benchmark. I imagine they are comparing raw operations per second (in some measure) but the comparison is totally meaningless.
- Tarang 13y agoI'm not sure of this specific calculation but in general they come from the network's total hashrate compared with the known floating point operations per second of the top 500 supercomputers. Not sure how flops has been equated to hashrates though. Nowadays it makes less sense since bitcoin hardware is ASIC/custom silicon designed & optimized for hashing as opposed to floating point operations making the comparison biased.
- throwaway_yy2Di 13y agoThe numbers are: 9 petahashes/second (entire Bitcoin network [FTA]), and 20 petaflops/second (IBM Sequoia [1]). If you equate a SHA-2 hash with a floating point op, the ratio is 0.45, not 4,500. [1] http://www.top500.org/system/177556 http://www.top500.org/system/177556
- Tarang 13y agoThis site (http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/ http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/) seems to do a 'flops' type conversion from the hashrate on the bitcoin network. Currently at 108239.28 Petaflops which is 5400x the performance of the IBM Sequoia. This is approximately the quoted amount of 4500. While I don't agree with the idea that a hashrate can be converted into flops because its more bitwise opts others are drawing similar calculations to UCSD. Also a bit more of a discussion on this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7675.20 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7675.20
- sp332 13y agoThanks for the numbers, but a SHA-256 hash takes a lot more than one "flop".
- maxerickson 13y agoDo you think that is a sensible equivalence? A Radeon 7990 gets around 1.2 gigahash/second and 8.2 teraflops. The ASICS are of course skewed towards hashes from there, and I guess the supercomputer could be more skewed towards floating point than the GPU, but a large factor seems more likely than a fraction.
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- wmf 13y agoBack in the GPU mining days people would say that since their GPU could do either 300 MH/s or 2 TFLOPS that every MH/s is equivalent to x GFLOPS. Then you multiply that by the total hashrate and get a ridiculous number and compare it to the Top500. As others have pointed out, this thinking does not apply to ASICs at all but journalists cannot resist it.
- oakwhiz 13y agoEven more hilarious is the fact that SHA-256 doesn't involve floating point operations at all in the first place.
- yetanotherphd 13y agoI used to hold the opinion that all proof-of-work systems were inherently flawed, because in order to protect against an attacker, you have to waste more resources than the attacker would have gained. Now I think that in practice, the amount that the attacker could gain might be quite small compared with the total value of the system.
- betterunix 13y agoIt's not that the attacker does less work than the honest parties. Rather, it is that the honest parties must work at least as hard as the attacker. If the attacker devotes a gigawatt, the honest parties must devote a gigawatt to defense. What I like to say is this: Would you use TLS if that was how it worked?
- sp332 13y agoTLS depends on a central certificate authority to vouch for the identity of the site you're visiting. If you don't have a centralized authority, a web-of-trust model is the best you can do.
- maaku 13y agoYes, I would. It'd be more secure than the CAs we have today. To be clear, each attacker must commit more work than every honest miner combined together.
- yetanotherphd 13y agoI'm not saying proof-of-work is appropriate in all cases. To use a more extreme value, a vault containing gold that was protected by proof of work would be useless, since the work required to open it would have to equal the value of the contents in order to discourage thieves. My point was that in some cases, like bitcoin, it might be possible that the value to the attacker of a successful attack on bitcoin was significant, but still much less than the total worth of bitcoin.
- vajorie 13y agoWe seem to keep finding ways to fuck up the earth for pretty useless and unnecessary reasons. I lol'd at our obvious dumbassness.
- bachback 13y agowhat the are you talking about.. start with being more conscious and make more effort to explain yourself. thanks. a fellow human being.
- drcode 13y agoBitcoins require mining as a security measure, which is a lot more energy efficient than the security measures for traditional currencies.
- betterunix 13y agoHere's the difference: banks have every incentive to try to reduce their power consumption, Bitcoin miners have every incentive to increase their power consumption.
- kiba 13y agoWrong. The less energy mining equipment consume, the more money they make. It's the hashing rate versus the cost of power.
- betterunix 13y agoYou are pretending that miners somehow do not double their income when they double the number of mining rigs they operate. A bitcoin miner makes more money by devoting more electrical power to Bitcoin, regardless of the hashes-per-second-per-watt ratio.
- kiba 13y agoIncreasing hashing only increases the proportion you get from subsidy + fees. It's a zero-sum game. If the other guy increases his hashing rate, you will lose out. Eventually, at some point, energy cost dominates.
- asselinpaul 13y agoGPU or ASIC based mining?
- wmf 13y agoBitcoin mining is all ASICs now.
- StringyBob 13y agoWhenever I see advances in mining rigs I just hope that someone invents a cryptocurrency where the mining actually does some useful work, like protein folding.
- parennoob 13y agoSpot on, this is exactly what I've been thinking for a while. Like the SETI@Home screensaver -- processing astronomy data, or number crunching for public institutions.
- drcode 13y agoNot possible- Having the calculation perform some alternate activity would destroy the utility of the calculation for protecting bitcoins. The best you could do is create a cryptocurrency that requires similar hardware to the hardware used for other tasks, so that this hardware is commoditized. This would help other fields indirectly.
- drcode 13y agoHow is it not "useful work" if bitcoiners like myself are glad these people exist and are happy to pay them for their work?
- lukifer 13y agoThe core of the proof-of-work concept is that the work is easier to verify than to do the work again. If a way can be found to do that with arbitrary computation, it would be a very big deal.
- yafujifide 13y agoPreventing double-spends is useful work.
- throwaway_yy2Di 13y agoThe fascinating thing about this idea is that you'd get an actual commodity money. Solving useful problems like protein folding is something people pay for, it has intrinsic value. This would be utterly unlikely Bitcoin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_money
- mmanfrin 13y agoQuestion: If BTC were to disappear overnight, could all these machines be retooled to do something else? Or are they so specifically made that their only possible purpose is coin mining?
- kiba 13y agoYep, their only purpose is bitcoin mining.
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- sktrdie 13y agoThey can be used to power another decentralized consensus system. Currency is only one application being used on the bitcoin network. If bitcoin dies for whatever reason (political or technical) the hashing power could still be used to secure and build another decentralized consensus network that could have many other functions other than being a currency: such as ways to send stocks, bonds, smart property and so on... in an entirely decentralized manner.
- joshz 13y agoCouple weeks ago these photos from a Hong Kong based mining facility floated up, pretty crazy setup. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=346134.msg3709913#msg3709913 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=346134.msg3709913#ms...