Topic: Government Super Computers USA, China, Japan, etc.. (Read 2120 times)

Thanks for your explanation. Now I understand my thoughts are simply crazy and unrealistic!

It may help to read the previous posts. Again:

Supercomputers are not cost effective hashers. For hashing you need integer processing power. There is no need for all the stuff supercomputers excell:

• Fast interconnects (Infiniband...)
• Vast amounts of RAM
• Fast Floating Point arithmetics
• Large disk arrays

And why on earth would governments join the mining fray when they can simply tax miners?

What if these governments secretly started a bitcoin investment arm, using supercomputers? However, it is very unlikely at the moment. :-)

Sounds like you are just paranoid.  Do you worry about other things in life, as well?

Why on earth would anyone, in any country use super computers for bitcoin LOL!!!

Which is why free energy should be on everyone's mind that's interested in mining efficiency.  If you have to only recoup HW costs than mining becomes profitable much sooner.

Western govts. not worried about BTC right now. They're too busy trying to prop up failing paper currency. I heard they are running out of the special paper they use to print Euros. There is talk in US about negative interest now. That $$ in your account is actually going to be sucked dry as they charge negative interest.

first i want to say that i agree with you, and that you are one of my favorite posters...

that said, i LOVE how no matter what the discussion is it comes back to MH/$ and MH/W

the other thing that i think we need to consider here is that there is very little need for the government to do this.. in the grand scheme of things even if they comprehend what bitcoins are.. they are such a low priority threat..

What a big entity (like a government) could do is to use its funds to fabricate dedicated hashing ASICs. However such move could be viewed as being BTC positive; you don't react to things which are supposedly meaningless (or pretend them to be as such). Bitcoin is in competition with fiat currencies so attacking it would mean it REALLY has started to be a viable alternative.

So... as long most people stick to fiat, pay taxes using fiat (and stay ignorant to debasement) there isn't reason to try actively suppressing BTC.

The top 500 contains multiple supercomputers which use GPUs.   The #2 supercomputer (which was the #1 not so long ago) gets roughly 30% of its computational power from over 7600 NVidia GPUs.   The reality is just that supercomputer are ill suited for mining.  They are inefficient on a MH/$ and MH/W basis because they tend to have lots of expensive (and power guzzling) stuff which do nothing for Bitcoin Mining.  Components like massive memory banks (as in hundreds of TBs), redundant high speed storage arrays (think thousands of 15K RPM SAS drives and now SSDs), ultra low latency high speed interconnects (20Gbps fiberchannel), node redundancy, etc.

Sure you could use a Supercomputer for bitcoin mining, and you could also use a ferrari for hauling gravel.  Doesn't mean it is a good fit.

Difficulty would go up, and some important scientific research would get neglected. That's about it.


Seeming as quantum computers just managed for factor the number 15 into 3 and 5, I don't think we have to worry about it. See below for the other repercussions.


The the bitcoins we hold are worth a whole lot more. It would skyrocket their popularity and value overnight...not a bad thing if you are holding long...




You might need some of this...

Maybe bitcoin is govt scheme to kill p2p networks. They will point to bitcoin, claim anarchy, and convince everyone that all p2p can be used for bitcoin so all p2p must be shutdown.  It's a common tactic used by govt.  Sort of like a false-flag operation.  Take an old aircraft carrier near an enemy, get them to attack and sink it. Then point the finger and say "see, they're bad". (in this case you also dispose of the carrier)

That would totally work because everyone does exactly what the government tells them to do.

If they really start hashing, I for one would be happy as Christmas was early. The value of bitcoin would soar, and our fiat would be backed with something better. If they wanted to take down bitcoin, they would go the painless way by enactif laws and whatnot, not by minig together.

I think it would be weird for that to start happening, if anything they'll make FPGA's cheaper lol

Some of them are GPU. Although they generally use nVidia which are not so good at hashing.

Crimson was talking about existing supercomputers. They are built for specific tasks which require more complex algorithms that hashing (FEM...) Generally a supercomputer is a bad choice for attacking Bitcoin because most of the cost go into the interconnects which are completely useless for a trivial parallel algorithm like hashing. Sure it's possible to *build* a mining rig that can mount a 51% attack. But that would require a budget of 50 million or so.

I don't expect managers to mount such an attack. Not one would take the responsibility. If we can counter it, the career of the persons responsible is history. It can even be legally challenged. I am sure the DMCA gives enough foothold to blow such attacks out of the water.

This is all conspiracy nuts talk. Governments may take action against Bitcoin but if they do it's not going to be with hacker attacks. If they decide to take action, it will be by making a law because that is what they are good at.

If you ask me what law I'd say that you'd have to de-anonymize Bitcoin, probably by registering your Bitcoin addresses with the government. They may also make it illegal for you to interact with an address that is not registered.

The difficulty rate would hit the moon. Probably every country and major corporation would be mining and DDosing each other for the next ten years. The winner would have the strongest economy for several years. The general public would win because money would be backed by something and governments would not be inflating money anymore.

If a govt did mine all remaining (or most remaining) what would happen? Would it be the end? Would the BTC price go up? Probably an old topic but I'm new to BTC.  Would the price go up and then the govt would dump their lot onto the market to wipe it out? Maybe they don't want to reveal what they are capable of doing so they don't?  Maybe it's not signficant to govts. I'm still having doubts that BTC is legit. BTC smells funny to me. Could all mining actually be solving some other unforseen problem?

Most people with access to supercomputers are probably more interested in academic/modelling purposes, but I am paranoid about the US thinking bitcoin is a threat and invest there considerable resources into mining the rest of the bitcoins.

There is no doubt that a nation or large corporation can have a GPU supercomputer designed and fabricated to order that would dominate the Bitcoin network. In fact, there would be many that would. They would also have IP addresses and would be subject to DD attacks. Welcome to World War Bitcoin. 

You speak about perpesctive and yet you link CPU supercomputers.

A single GPU supercomputers worth some millions of $ would have more power than the bitcoin network.

The one thing governments can't keep secret is how big something is.