[cryptography] Bitcoin-mining Botnets observed in the wild? (was: Re: Bitcoin in endgame

[Adam Back]

An never mind... the 555MH and 12.4TH its 23,000 AMD 7970 GPU equivalents,
that back in the land of plausible.

Or 158 petflops if you accept bitcoinwatch.com's sha256 to "flop" conversion
ratio.  A human brain by comparison is generally considered to be about
10-100x less than the current bitcoin network (10^15 - 10^16 ops/sec).

So maybe the bitcoin network has just enough power to simulate a single
human brain.  Except a human brain consumes 25watts and even with 23,000
7970s the bitcoin network must be using more than 5 MW.

Moore's law still has a lot of work to do to catchup with biologial
computers in efficiency and horsepower.

Adam

On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 01:22:44AM +0200, Adam Back wrote:
> Strikes me 12TH/sec is not actually very much computation?  
> http://bitcoinwatch.com/ also gives network hashrate at 12.4 TH/sec.
>
> But a single normally clocked (925Mhz) AMD 7970 based graphics card which
> has 2048 cores is claimed to provide 555MH/sec.
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