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by Double_a_92 3219 days ago
Except that fiat money is stored on a "normal" server. Not on many computers that constantly do full power calculations, on purpose!

If all the super computers on the world started mining Bitcoins, it would take them 10 minutes (or so) of calculation to mine a block. The 10 minutes are fixed, it doesn't get faster even if you get faster computers. Just the power waste gets higher.

1 comments

That's not strictly correct, the difficulty to mine Bitcoin has increased massively over time:

https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

Every 2016 blocks the difficulty adjusts so that ON AVERAGE a block is found every 10 minutes. If the hashing power of the network is increasing over time, the amount of time it takes to find a block goes down (can be less than 10 mins) as it approaches the next difficulty adjustment (and vice versa).

But you are correct that as the hash rate increases, the total power consumption increase along with it -- at the moment there is no proven alternative.