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Bitcoin hash-rate exceeds total computing power of all the world’s computers
- jdiez17 13y agoThis 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.
- smoyer 13y agoIn 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.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- martinald 13y agoVery worrying. The environmental impacts of Bitcoin are absolutely horrendous.
- quantumf 13y agoASIC'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.
- betterunix 13y agoAh 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.]
- cheald 13y ago...assuming that you have the resources to purchase 30KW worth of ASICs. A 1W ASIC does not cost 1/300th of a 300W PC.
- betterunix 13y agoAll you are saying is that the transition to 30kW of ASICs will not happen overnight. If you stopped at 1W, you would quickly find that you are making less money than you were before -- your competitors will also switch to ASICs, and will consume more than 1W because they want to make more money. To put it another way, not going to 30kW of ASICs is equivalent to taking 30kW of PC mining hardware and turning some of it off (in a pre-ASIC world where PCs are the most efficient mining hardware available).
- datphp 13y agoIf 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.
- OmarIsmail 13y agoHow 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 13y agoAnd 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 13y agoWhy 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 13y agoThe total computing of the Bitcoin network consumes many orders of magnitude less power than all of the world's computers combined.
- sickpig 13y agoFWIW even the industrial revolution had a huge environmental impacts.
- jbb555 13y agoYeah, best we all go back to caves and lie down and die.
- TheRubyist 13y agoIt's such a waste of computing power.
- OmarIsmail 13y agoMining 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.
- Nursie 13y agoIt's only required because of the decentralisation fetish of coiners. Perfectly secure systems exist that don't require this lunacy.
- dasil003 13y agoFirst of all, there's no such thing as a perfectly secure system, second of all, you tar people who are interested in decentralization at your own peril. The type of power that is being consolidated in multinational corporations is greater than anything that's ever existed in the history of the world. If we don't want to wake up as serfs one day we should be taking decentralization and other technological democratic aids seriously while we have the chance.
- betterunix 13y agoAs opposed to the power Bitcoin exchanges, Bitcoin mining pools, and Bitcoin developers have over Bitcoin? The supposed decentralization in Bitcoin is theoretical at best; in practice, power is concentrated in a few key places. So really, we could make a better system, one that uses far less power, by just accepting that some things cannot be decentralized and designing a system accordingly.
- dasil003 13y ago
- throwaway_yy2Di 13y agoThis 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1933192
- rtpg 13y agoI think it underscores more that general-purpose PCs are terrible at single-task programs.
- Helianthus 13y agoWhat 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.
- MiWCryptohn 13y agoHardly 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.
- Helianthus 13y 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 13y agoNow if they would all have been mapping cancer markers and analyzing gravitational wave fluctuations through BOINC ... :( You can only wish..
- vidarh 13y agoA huge proportion of the current hashing power is asic miners that are only suitable for coin mining for sha256 type coins.
- kubiiii 13y agoBreaking 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 13y agoI 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-the-world http://www.ask.com/question/how-many-computers-are-there-in-...
- ck2 13y agoI 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.
- MiWCryptohn 13y agoDoesn'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.
- MiWCryptohn 13y agoOne 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 13y 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 13y agoNot all the worlds computers, all the worlds personal computers. That's a big difference.
- DanBC 13y agoI got a bit confused think of the set of all the world's computers that didn't include the computers doing bitcoin stuff.
- smoyer 13y agoWell ... 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.
- chrisBob 13y agoWhat frame rate can I get playing Portal on a bitcoin mining ASIC? Oh. Well, I am not impressed then.
- TheCoelacanth 13y agoWhy would you want to play Portal when you could endlessly calculate SHA hashes instead?
- chrisBob 13y agoI guess different people go for different things. I have never gotten too excited about SHA hashes.
- bakhy 13y agoi 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 13y ago"I would assume that the average" how very scientific