Many of us ( Crypto Fanatics and Geeks ) may have these question's popping out of nowhere when you hear the word "SUPERCOMPUTERS", which is nothing,but...mining bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies with these highly effecient computers. You may also wonder about how much bitcoins can you mine ?,how long does it take to mine them ?, would it not be possible to mine ALL the bitcoins if you had access to some of the most powerful computers?,and various other things,well,you certainly are not going to like the answers to these questions...here's why.
There are two main reasons why they can't flash mine bitcoins:
DIFFICULTY and SPECIALIZED HARDWARE (ASIC's)
As you understand it, "mining bitcoin" requires "significant" computational prowess. A lot of dedicated mining rigs have been built out of FPGAs, ASICs and GPUs. and it is hightime for you to realize that running a supercomputer to mine bitcoins may NOT be efficient (because a super computer consumes too much power, costs a lot of money, etc).the cons just keep adding up,A supercomputer is way slower than mining with ASICs. This is because a supercomputer only has much CPU power, and less GPU power. while,ASICs are way more powerfull than GPUs. ASICs are chips that can only execute one algorithm because it is hardwired into the chip. As these Bitcoin ASICs are single-purpose designed to solve only the calculations required for mining, they are highly optimized to do so. This lack in flexibility allows to increase their efficiency over general purpose hardware immensely, ASICs represent the hashing algorithm as a hardware, which means they can't do anything else. That's also one major reason why they are so fast.
At http://bitcoinwatch.com/ you can see the current network hashrate
And coming back to the difficulty part of this article, The pace at which the Bitcoin is created is highly limited. The protocol defines how difficult it is to find more bitcoins. However, because the difficulty adjustment happens after a fixed number of blocks, the time until readjustment is shorter when blocks are found at a higher rate.When blocks are discovered quicker than the target 10 minute interval, the protocol requires a readjustment to a higher difficulty, which in turn causes the pace to slow down. (confused ? Let me put it in simpler words. )
Basically as the total hashpower on the network goes up, a parameter called bits in the block headers goes down. This means that the amount of effort that miners have to expend to mine a block increases. If the hashpower of the network were to increase by a factor of 10, then the bits value would adjust such that the network would require 10 times more hashpower to mine each block as before. This has already happened many times over the lifespan of Bitcoin - modern ASICs are millions of times more powerful than the CPUs that were originally used to mine Bitcoin blocks. Yet the time to generate a block remains at 10 minutes on average.
For a more detailed explanation see: How does the network adjust the rate at which the coins are created?
That being said you may wonder ,"why are we even building supercomputers if ASICs are better? "
That's actually a really important part of the argument: ASICs are only made to do one thing, so it's not even a fair comparison. A specialized tool will usually win out over a general-purpose one for the one task it's designed to complete. We're comparing a rocket car to a Honda Civic here - the rocket car is obviously going to be faster, but you sure wouldn't want to drive it to work.
well,the next question that you may ask is "what about quantum computers and using them for mining Bitcoins ? " I know most of you are excited to about this particular question,but this post is all about super computers and mining bitcoins. Anyways..I will be covering everything related to quantum computing and bitcoin mining in the next post.
I hope this article suffices most of your questions related supercomputers and bitcoins. Feel free to comment down your questions/thoughts regarding this topicand make sure to hit tipper if you like it.
