
Bitcoin Network Speed 8 Times Faster than Top 500 Supercomputers Combined - tjaerv
http://www.thegenesisblock.com/bitcoin-network-8-times-faster-than-top-500-super-computers-combined/
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kaib
Interestingly 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
Why is it's parallelism "embarrassing"

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cjh_
It 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>

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bigiain
Hmmm, 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
What 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.

~~~
sneak
> 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.

~~~
gwern
Yes, 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> ), 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.

~~~
michaelt
I'd imagine the economics of variable / nonrecurring engineering costs are
different at that scale. Their tech might only let them make 200MHz chips
instead of 2GHz, but couldn't they just make ten times as many of them?

It's been a long time since CPUs have seen much of a bump in clock rates,
after all - nowerdays it's all about smaller features allowing more
cores/cache in the same space. If you don't care much about space as your
process costs are dominated by setup rather than wafer costs, wouldn't you
just use more space?

~~~
iso8859-1
Heat dissipation is a limiting factor and larger chips require higher
voltages. Which would require a even lower clock rate.

~~~
michaelt
Let's say the NSA's chip fab is 10 years out of date - the same technologies
as an Athlon XP "3000+" 2.1 GHz CPU with a 70 watt TDP. Worked just fine in a
lot of consumer desktop PCs.

If they needed a lower TDP, couldn't they just drop the clock rate and use
wider features for lower gate leakage?

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DannyBee
Agreed. It's also likely the case that in practice, their TDP doesn't matter.

Yes, they have a budget, but somehow i think their main problem is more
finding sources of electricity and cooling, not paying for it.

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russellsprouts
It 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.

~~~
jsmeaton
After reading the article above, I had an idea for something similar to
folding@home. Essentially a business that pays regular people $X to register
as a compute unit and charges businesses to use that compute infrastructure
for massive map-reduce type jobs.

The trick would be charging just enough to financially compete with something
like AWS, and paying just enough to compete with bitcoin mining.

Or it could be a stupid idea - I don't know. But I wouldn't be surprised if
someone smarter than me was able to find an angle that'd make this profitable
(or already has?).

~~~
wmf
This has been tried several times over the last 15 years (e.g. United
Devices); in general the idle time on random PCs is worth less than the
overhead of organizing it.

~~~
jsmeaton
Is this still true though? Lots of businesses are spinning up instances in
"the cloud" for big compute jobs and then shutting them down. What bigger
cloud is there than the millions of idle internet connected devices?

I've only invested about 5 minutes thinking about it, and previous failures
are probably a strong indicator that the idea isn't profitable. I'm just
questioning whether previous attempts were premature.

There is a market for un-utilised compute (bitcoin/torrent) and a market that
requires compute (AWS/Azure/Etc). An intermediary to join these two markets
seems like an opportunity (naively).

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pi18n
Nobody wants this more because it is a security nightmare than anything else.
What do you need to distributively compute but is mundane enough you are
willing to let random people know the data and algorithms?

~~~
gizmo686
<http://boinc.berkeley.edu/>

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pi18n
Scientific research with volunteer computers seems to be the one case where it
makes sense. Perhaps scientific research with paid computers would also make
sense? There I think the price point is wrong to incentivize anyone to
contribute resources.

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AYBABTME
All this energy and computing power wasted creating numbers so that we can use
them as a currency. If only Bitcoin was computing something useful.

~~~
xtracto
This is something that has been in my mind for some time: If I understand
correctly, the bitcoin generating process is based in computing SHA's.

So, I wonder if those computations could be used for something else? Maybe
having a database similar to Rainbow Tables, which allows people to look for
previously calculated SHA's to avoid calculating them...

~~~
ewillbefull
Almost any proof-of-work algorithm could be used. However, if you add an
algorithm which is useful to the outside, it decreases the cost of attack
(since you earn something probabilistically on top of simply a block reward).
Depending on what kind of algorithms you use, this could be dangerous for
network security.

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seabrookmx
The 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.

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nwhitehead
Computing 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.

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zer0gravity
Bitcoin 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?

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mseebach
> 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?

So, currency is more than anything the medium that enables trade. Trade
enables specialisation and cooperation on a massive scale. If the scope and
benefit of global trade doesn't "transcend the individual", I struggle to
think of anything that does.

The classic "I, Pencil" essay[1], while written even polemically in support of
capitalism, also serves as a great example of the scale of human cooperation
enabled by currency.

1: <http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html>

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zer0gravity
Yeah, trade transcends the individual, but profit based capitalism does not.
If your utility function is profit, you will get egotistical behavior. What we
should really try to maximize is the number of smiles in this world, because
that, I think, is a better measure of the success of a society. We should
really strive to feel better not to have more. Money is an instrument that
favors egotistical thinking, counting what we have, but funny enough, we seem
to feel better when we give more, not when we get more.

~~~
mseebach
That makes no sense. Self interest is why it works.

Adam smith said it succinctly: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher
the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to
their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their
self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their
advantages."

<http://www.classicreader.com/book/770/3/>

As for "maximising the number of smiles" and "strive to feel better, not to
have more", there is research that suggests that the way to do that is to
become richer:

[http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2013/04/subjective-...](http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2013/04/subjective-
well-being-income)

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jaytaylor
Seems like another case of capitalism at work.

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mkarttic
how 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_botne...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet#Historical_list_of_botnets)

edit: grammar.

~~~
DasIch
In 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.

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ck2
If only all that cpu power was doing folding or some kind of humankind benefit
other than profit, or at least in addition to profit.

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Aardwolf
Why spend so much computing power on $ 2 billion worth of coinage? Isn't the
cost of that computer power more?

~~~
brazzy
Not even close. According to <http://realtimebitcoin.info/> about 5 MW are
used for Bitcoin. According to
<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.

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a3voices
I wonder what the alt currencies are up to combined at this point (Litecoin,
etc.)

