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by sliverstorm 4792 days ago
Do 500W GPUs play any part in this? No. The bitcoin client is a standalone app that can run on any machine. Mining (generating hashes) does not, to my knowledge, actually operate the network.

Hell, if bitcoin needs 1000 petaflops just to operate the network when it is still a fringe currency, how exactly is it supposed to scale to mainstream use?
2 comments
brazzy 4792 days ago
The computing effort required by mining is almost completely decoupled from the actual number of transactions. It's designed to scale up with the available computing power, that's why it has grown.
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baddox 4791 days ago
> Mining (generating hashes) does not, to my knowledge, actually operate the network.

You're incorrect. The proof-of-work requirement is integral to the Bitcoin network, because it makes fraud unprofitable. The amount of computation required to create a block chain longer than the honest one should cost more than the potential benefits of doing so. That said, as far as I know, any proof-of-work algorithm could be used as long as a large portion of clients adopted it, so it should be possible to use work that is useful in itself.

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sliverstorm 4791 days ago
So what you are saying is that Bitcoin will always require a horrific amount of computational power, just to prevent fraudulent generation of blocks? I'm starting to like the idea of mainstream Bitcoin less and less... 1000 petaflops just to maintain the network? Does that not raise the eyebrow?
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baddox 4791 days ago
I don't think it's "horrific," and I think the phrase "just to prevent fraudulent generation of blocks" vastly understates the awesomeness of having a virtually fraud-proof transaction log without relying on a centralized party.
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sliverstorm 4791 days ago
Well, if Bitcoin goes mainstream it seems like we could expect it would require 51% of all computational power on the planet at all times, which would indeed be horrific as well as tragic, IMO.

Sure, the perfect currency is valuable. But is such a sheer brute-force approach to security the best we can do?

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baddox 4790 days ago
What makes you think it would require 51% of all computational power? That would only be true if there were no other valuable things to compute, which is very unlikely to be the case.
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