Ask HN: Putting BitCoin Hashrate to other uses
The Bitcoin Hashrate is over 7,000,000 TH/s. I have no concept of how large this is, but in terms of supercomputer, I am assuming its large. How large is it, (assuming all the same and modern) how many GPUs are we talking to get this large? It is a power station all to itself to power it all?
Then, imagine a world where this could be harnessed, what could this do?
i.e.:
* How long will it take to crack a SSL site
* Remember SETI from the early 2000's. I am sure NASA would love this power.
* Are there genome/DNA projects that would take moments to finish rather than years So, I'd imagine that the bitcoin network is 99.999999% ASICs now. So what that means is that there will be less machines and less electricity used to generate that 7m th/s, compared to GPUs only. Still, it is a massive amount of electricity and metal and man-hours being put to use, that could be on something different. If you just take every GPU and CPU that Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Sun (rip), Huawei etc etc all make, and you add those up, you will get a seriously massive amount of computing power. Check out the top500.org website to see all of the supercomputers out there. They are simulating some cool problems. The bottleneck is software, i.e "what do we do with all this hardware we've chained together"