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Topic: Bitcoin network hashrate is 35 times higher than top 500 supercomputers (Read 3981 times)

full member
Activity: 130
Merit: 100
This is of course a bad comparison because bitcoin hashing hardware is specialized and supercomputers are not.

If governments wanted to attack bitcoin, they would develop custom ASICs.
hero member
Activity: 980
Merit: 500
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Also why top 500 and not every single supercomputer combined?
sr. member
Activity: 271
Merit: 250
does this not at least say it's not possible anymore to get the 51% for the malicious banks and governments? Or am i missing sth here?
full member
Activity: 154
Merit: 100
legendary
Activity: 1904
Merit: 1002
Completely meaningless statistic.

Bitcoin ASIC miners can't even compute a floating point operation so they are not at all comparable to a supercomputer that can be used for many things.

Comparing specialized bitcoin hardware to supercomputers simply can't be done. The bitcoin network is faster at performing SHA256 hashes, but thats it.

Assuming the supercomputers also are quite capable of integer arithmetic, it would be interesting to have an estimate of the mining hashpower such machines have.

Usually they aren't very good at integer math.  Most calculations use floating point.  Unfortunately, most of the important constants in science are not integers (pi, e, phi, etc) and rarely are the things you want to measure integer length.
sr. member
Activity: 280
Merit: 250
Completely meaningless statistic.

Bitcoin ASIC miners can't even compute a floating point operation so they are not at all comparable to a supercomputer that can be used for many things.

Comparing specialized bitcoin hardware to supercomputers simply can't be done. The bitcoin network is faster at performing SHA256 hashes, but thats it.

Assuming the supercomputers also are quite capable of integer arithmetic, it would be interesting to have an estimate of the mining hashpower such machines have.
hero member
Activity: 546
Merit: 500
Completely meaningless statistic.

Bitcoin ASIC miners can't even compute a floating point operation so they are not at all comparable to a supercomputer that can be used for many things.

Comparing specialized bitcoin hardware to supercomputers simply can't be done. The bitcoin network is faster at performing SHA256 hashes, but thats it.
legendary
Activity: 3430
Merit: 3080
Always beware that these figures are FLOP equivalent, and not actual FLOP measurement. SHA-2 uses integer mathematics, there are no floating point operations, and hence, no FLOPS measurable directly.
hero member
Activity: 518
Merit: 500
Bitcoin network hashrate
7926.83 PetaFLOPS
(http://bitcoincharts.com/bitcoin/)


Top 500 supercomputers
33.86 PetaFLOPS
(http://www.top500.org/statistics/perfdevel/)



according to that site its 671.025 Thash/s? or am I looking in the wrong place?
ask
legendary
Activity: 1386
Merit: 1004
Bitcoin network hashrate
7926.83 PetaFLOPS
(http://bitcoincharts.com/bitcoin/)

Top 500 supercomputers
223.54 PetaFLOPS
(http://www.top500.org/statistics/perfdevel/)

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