Bitcoin mining machines are insane powerhouses, and
they’re only getting crazier. How much power is getting sunk into the digital crypto
currency? More than the world’s top 500 supercomputers combined. What a waste.
According to Bitcoin Watch, the
whole Bitcoin network hit a record-breaking high of 1 exaFLOPS this weekend.
When you're talking about FLOPS, you're really talking about the number of Floating-point Operations a
computer can do Per Second, or more simply, how fast it can tear
through math problems. It's a pretty common standard for measuring computer
power. An exaFLOPS is 1018, or
1,000,000,000,000,000,000 math problems per second. The most powerful
supercomputer in the world, Sequoia,
can manage a mere 16 petaFLOPS, or just 1.6 percent of the power geeks around
the world have brought to bear on mining Bitcoin. The world's top 10
supercomputers can
muster 5 percent of that total, and even the top 500 can only muster a mere 12.8
percent.
And that 1 exaFLOPS number is
probably a little low. Because Bitcoin miners actually do a simpler kind of
math (integer operations), you have to do a little (messy) conversion to get to
FLOPS. And because the new ASIC miners-machines that are built from scratch to
do nothing but mine Bitcoins-can't even do other
kinds of operations, they're left out of the total entirely. So what we've got
here is a representation of the total power spent on Bitcoin mining that could
theoretically be spent on something else, like real problems.
Because
of the way Bitcoin self-regulates, the math problems Bitcoin mining rigs
have to do to get more 'coin get harder and harder as time goes on. Not to any
particular end, but just to make sure the world doesn't get flooded with
Bitcoins. So all these computers aren't really accomplishing anything other
than solving super difficult and necessarily arbitrary puzzles for cyber money.
It's kind of like rounding up the world's greatest minds and making them do
Sudokus for nickels.
Projects
like Folding-Home and SETI-Home use similarly networked power for the
less-pointless practices of parsing information that could lead to more
effective medicines or finding extra-terrestrial life, respectively, and either
are hard-pressed to scrounge up even half of a percent of the power the Bitcoin
network is rocking. And with specialized Bitcoin-mining hardware on the rise,
there's going to be an army of totally powerhouse PCs out there that are
good for literally nothing but digging up cybercoins.
It's
incredible to think about the amount of power being directed at this one,
singular purpose; power that's essentially being
""donated"" by thousands of people across the globe just
because they have skin in the game. It's by far the most computational effort
that has ever been devoted to a single purpose. And sure, Bitcoins are fine and
all, but can you imagine what we could do if this energy was put behind other
tough problems? We'll you're going to have to because so long as mining Bitcoins
can earn you money and folding proteins can't, it's pretty clear which one is
gonna get done.