Bitcoin network has 6-8x more power than 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.

Servers 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.