Add up the combined computing power of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world—that’s billions upon billions of dollars worth of hardware—and stack it up against to the raw processing power of every computer currently producing the alternative currency bitcoin, and what do you get?The network of computers “mining” bitcoin is more powerful—eight times more powerful, in fact.And that’s not all: The bitcoin network also qualifies as the world’s first exascale computer, meaning it’s capable of a quintillion floating point calculations per second.Some people argue that exascale computing will make possible everything from predicting the effects of climate change to producing energy with fusion.Supercomputers aren’t expected to achieve that speed until sometime around 2020.However, bitcoin mining is distributed among the multitude of machines that devote computing power to the network, helping to solve cryptographic puzzles every 10 minutes, for which they are sometimes rewarded with new bitcoins.

And the bitcoin network has become so specialized that much of it cannot be used for any other purpose.So what bitcoin has wrought is the world’s fastest supercomputer that can only be used to mine bitcoin.Add this to the $150,000 a day bitcoin miners are collectively spending on electricity to produce about half a million dollars worth of bitcoin, and the scale of the computing resources currently devoted to producing the virtual currency really comes into perspective.ethereum summaryI had a meeting today with a TA about the thesis I’m writing.bitcoin core and torIn it, I’ll be examining particular social structures found in the Bitcoin network.bitcoin y nuevo orden mundialAlthough he’s curious about Bitcoin, my TA doesn’t know much about it beyond what he’s seen in the press.

He asked, “So just how much compute power is on the network right now?” I know that for a long time, the total hashpower of the Bitcoin network is some multiple of the top-500 supercomputers combined, so I told him just that.But I wanted to know just how big that multiple was.The number I came up with totally boggles my mind.In late November, 2013 Forbes contributor Reuven Cohen published an article in which he found the Bitcoin network to be 256x faster than the top-500 supercomputers in the world.) and the sum of the performance of the TOP500 supercomputer index.(He also acknowledges that it’s not quite 100% kosher to compare hashes/second to FLOPS, but he runs with it anyways.We’ll do the same here.)Well, that was two years ago.How do the numbers compare today?, the Bitcoin network is currently achieving 7059965.06 petaFLOPS of compute power.The most recent list of Top500 supercomputers, released in November 2015, cumulatively achieves a peak performance of 642 petaFLOPS.If you divide the Bitcoin network by the TOP500, you find that the Bitcoin network is faster by a factor of 10,996.8.

So, what does this mean?Well, it’s hard to say.I take Cohen’s stance and say that these numbers are just fun to look at.But it makes you think about the computational arms race that created the modern Bitcoin network.If Bitcoin (and cryptocurrencies in general) are such young technologies, and the network’s total compute power is several orders of magnitude greater than the peak performers in the supercomputing space, one is left to wonder what that network will look like years from now, assuming it persists at all.For some, Bitcoin conjures ideas of a utopian decentralized currency, but many others these days think of it as a quick way to make a buck.Countless hordes of Bitcoin prospectors are now using their computers to “mine” for Bitcoins by solving for specific hashed values.Now, the processing power of these miners is being estimated to be six to eight times greater than the top 500 supercomputers combined.A Bitcoin-centric site called The Genesis Block recently broke down the data that shows just how powerful the Bitcoin mining network actually is.

The processing power estimates passed one exaflops (1018 floating-point operations per second) recently, and that is no small feat.Sequoia, one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, is capable of 16.32 petaflops, but that’s only 1.6% of the estimated power of the Bitcoin mining network.As it turns out, the processing power of these computers dedicated to mining for Bitcoins is somewhere between six and eight times greater than all of the top 500 supercomputers combined.Keep in mind, these estimates aren’t perfect.As Bitcoin mining doesn’t rely on floating-point operations, these estimates are based on opportunity costs.Now that we have hardware with application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) designed from the ground up to do nothing but mine Bitcoins, these estimates become even more fuzzy.Even so, the sheer muscle of this distributed computing is undeniably jaw-dropping.Even the most skeptical among us has to be dumbfounded by the power.Unfortunately, this isn’t just a feel-good “look at all these damn flops” story.

Some people are getting rather upset that all of this horsepower is being wasted on solving meaningless problems for cold, hard cash.Instead of looking for virtual money, this network could be used to help us understand physics or even cure diseases.While it would most certainly be better for humanity to fold proteins or search for radio signals with distributed computing of this scale, it just isn’t that appealing.The fact is, none of that is as enticing as getting paid.Regardless of motivations, this is a perfect example of why distributed computing is such an amazing technique.500 of the world’s fastest computers can only do a small fraction of what a network of this size can accomplish.If we can take what we’ve learned from Bitcoin mining and apply it to scientific endeavors, we might just get something meaningful accomplished.Think how fast these miners would jump on Folding@home if the US government promised massive rewards for curing diseases.That’s a government subsidy that we could all get behind.Now read: Bitcoin isn’t illegal because it isn’t real money[Image credit: Zach Copley & Dennis van Zuijlekom]