Bitcoin Network Speed 8 Times Faster than Top 500 Supercomputers Combined
thegenesisblock.com
thegenesisblock.com
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.
Bitcoin's computational power numbers aren't relevant for another reason though: it's entirely confined to computing sha256, and only in a special way...
There has also been some discussion lately that Rmax, the performance indicator of Top500 has started to diverge from sustained performance. Sustained performance is a general term for actual science produced with a machine as opposed to performing well on the LINPACK benchmark.
Edit: There is also a huge difference running Gigabit Ethernet over short spans as opposed to over the Internet. Latency as opposed to bandwidth is the limiting factor for many algorithms. Light takes a lot less time to travel across the aisle as opposed to across the continent.
Machines take small work packets and crunch numbers, then pass back results in minutes. For many clusters, various steps of the algorithms require fast messaging for things like MPI.
TL;DR Bitcoin: no coordination during work
Tasks in bioinformatics "decoding human genome" is typically of this type, and are generally performed on clusters, even if a supercomputer is available. Where I used to study, applications for CPU time at the supercomputer for workloads that could run on a cluster was generally rejected, and directed to the clusters instead.
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.
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.
Indeed, the NSA has their own fab.
Perhaps more interesting is the codebreaking ability latent in the bitcoin network. That must be a tempting target for a variety of agencies around the world.
They could always just fab architectures specialized in BTC mining, assuming their fabrication capacity is of sufficient scale to get the job done.
I'm sure anyone who successfully performed a hostile takeover of BTC could find ways to recoup the initial investment in hardware.
That said, I would assume the majority of their fab output and available computing power is busy with more important things.
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?
If they needed a lower TDP, couldn't they just drop the clock rate and use wider features for lower gate leakage?
Yes, they have a budget, but somehow i think their main problem is more finding sources of electricity and cooling, not paying for it.
In fact, the theoretical peak of Titan's 19k GPUs would be around 90 single-precision petaflops, comfortably higher than the estimated peak of 2 million reasonably recent x86 processors in Google's data centers (unlikely to be top-of-the-range number crunchers).
I've worked in HPC with a variety of actors for over a decade; I am in no doubt that classified machines exist with more power than Titan and Sequoia (#1, #2), which together make up most of the computing power in the top500 (it follows a power distribution, appropriately).
An exaflop is still a really, really big number though. I can hazard a few guesses at non-public machines in the US that would reach or beat Titan. Perhaps the US Govt commands an exaflop of power spread amongst several agencies, but I wouldn't place any bets on it.
That the bitcoin mining network has reached this scale is both astounding and depressing. That's an awful lot of computing power going to waste.
If we valued one bitcoin at $1 million today, we would have a problem, because the hardware required to attack the network would be much cheaper than the potential gains of an attack.
Titan (the current #1 supercomputer) had a budget of around $100 million. Clearly, the comparison is stupid.
For example, Amazon or Google also hold serious computing power - if they would throw all of it at once for an hour, then it wouldn't be THAT expensive compared to the effect.
Make no mistake, though - the large mining pools are the spacing guild of bitcoin; without them, there is no network.
Unfortunately they (via their users) would not welcome such a switch after so much time and effort and money has already been expended to be able to increase sha256 speed to the point it is at now.
Perhaps this is why Litecoin chose scrypt instead?
Regardless, the proof-of-work we have in Bitcoin today is likely what we'll have in Bitcoin forever, like it or not.
A single lock is much closer to encryption than it is to 'race the world' levels of proof of work.
The security of Bitcoin against double-spending is literally based on wasting so much money that it is unattractive for an attacker to spend a matching amount of money on a double-spend attack. The network must spend this money all the time, though - it can't know in advance when it is being attacked.
An attacker with enough resources can also force the network to either match their spending, or be rendered useless.
Bitcoin is an inherently wasteful system, and it actively resists scaling. There are alternatives, the most proven of which is a centralized ledger run by a trusted third party.
Even if there were no viable alternatives at all, I would still have doubts about the sustainability of the current system. The cost of running the network is just too large compared to the amount of real economic activity.
To go back to the silly analogy, you need a 20 ton lock but you can only use 'cost plus' bidding and all the contractors keep making the lock bigger until they get every possible cent out of the process.
1) There are now more transactions to check.
2) The transactions can be verified by more people now, resulting in a more secure network.
Hell, if bitcoin needs 1000 petaflops just to operate the network when it is still a fringe currency, how exactly is it supposed to scale to mainstream use?
You're incorrect. The proof-of-work requirement is integral to the Bitcoin network, because it makes fraud unprofitable. The amount of computation required to create a block chain longer than the honest one should cost more than the potential benefits of doing so. That said, as far as I know, any proof-of-work algorithm could be used as long as a large portion of clients adopted it, so it should be possible to use work that is useful in itself.
Sure, the perfect currency is valuable. But is such a sheer brute-force approach to security the best we can do?
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?).
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).
To really be practical it would require useful homomorphic encryption and fast internet speeds, though.
It's been done. That you've never heard of the company doing this indicates how successful it's been.
Imagine a future where Bitcoin dominates the markets. Then you'll have this whole planet dedicated to the computation of hashes for no other sake than computing hashes. Picture yourself an alien civilization, coming to meet us and seeing we spend most of the energy we produce computing numbers and giving them an arbitrary value.
While I think there's a lot of arbitrary stuff going on in the financial world, it's still less arbitrary than computing numbers for the sake of computing numbers.
Also, even if bitcoin became the dominant global currency, I highly doubt that it would take up a noticeable portion of the world's computing resources.
That's the really interesting bit about Bitcoin - it's an attempt to create a system that will enable trust in Internet-scale groups.
Currency is obviously a prime candidate for "trust", but I also think Namecoin is tremendously interesting. Next up, PKI certs? Eliminating hard-to-scale single points of trust (whether the DNS roots, VeriSign or governments) is hardly "doing nothing".
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...
In terms of environmental impact, Bitcoin ranks pretty low on the scale. More energy is wasted with people tuning in to "Dancing with the Stars".
Meanwhile, considering the accuracy of NOAA's WX machines via-a-vis the Europeans. Useful? How about all that nano-trading on Wall Street ... not useful? Blizzard's money machines must be useful to their tens-of-millions of consumers.
FPGA's are still the largest contributors I would think. Funnily enough the author didn't even mention them in his article.
Bitcoin enthusiasts should also consider that the Top500 is not an exhaustive list; governments have much more computational power than is on the list.
To me the whole thing is a manifestation of the bizarre way BTC are handed out, by competitive mining. (No, I don't have a better solution, but can't you see the issue here, the same amount of BTC are created but ever more power is being used)
Not only could the value of the big-data-backed cryptocurrency grow in value off the speculation, you could charge companies to upload/stream their data into the network and essentially have a giant distributed supercomputer processing it and searching for patterns. Then share a percentage of any revenue with the miners as an added bonus.
I feel we're already at the point where more data is produced than our ability to process, understand and extract useful insights from that data. And the rate at which global data is produced appears to be on a never ending exponential growth curve.
So in one swoop you could lay the foundations for a global distributed currency whilst harnessing the collective computing power of the Internet to solve humanity's problems, gain tremendously powerful insights into human behaviour at all levels from micro to macro, make us more efficient as a species and eventually the potential to become the global AI that feeds off all data streams; constantly feeding in, being processed, recorded, analysed, and subsequently feeding the computed knowledge into agents that make real-world decisions and actions.
If anyone has thoughts, skills or interest in this... hit me up.
Exactly, I think it is possible to create a distributed cyptocurrency and use that computation for something useful in the same time.
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.
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-...
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...
edit: grammar.
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.
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.