The virtual currency Bitcoin , created by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, never ceases to amaze. Conceived as a global payment system independent of national authorities for weeks many questioned their legality or if I could get to become a financial bubble .
In recent times, in which the value of Bitcoin has been up, we have seen how it unfolded a small ecosystem of companies and users operating around this new form of payment. Furthermore, its stability has varied greatly from a few days to other, causing many people to doubt the reliability of Bitcoin as a safe alternative economically.
But in addition to the importance of the creation of Bitcoin, for the innovative features that have been telling you earlier, we now know that the network of supercomputers used to undermine this new payment method has a very high computing power. The set of computers which enable this virtual currency Exaflop has reached, in other words, are able to perform 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second. This very high computing power is eight times higher than that of the 500 most powerful supercomputers on Earth.
Although among the largest supercomputers in the world are some the Sequoia IBM, Fujitsu’s K Computer or Cray Jaguar, none of these computers is minimally about the features found responsible for Bitcoin network. In fact it is estimated that the computing power of supercomputers 500 set only around 12% of the capacity of the computers in charge of the new virtual currency.
Sequoia, the IBM supercomputer powerful, headed the list of top supercomputers in the world, has only 1.6% of the computing power that has the Bitcoin network. The set of computers of this online payment system is distributed over many computers scattered around the world, helping to undermine the currency. Not only that, but some estimates have put the cost of electricity for computers that support Bitcoin is around $ 150,000 per day.
Impressive figures that make the new virtual currency Bitcoin not only an interesting payment system, but also an interesting way to understand computer network that operates for this virtual currency possible.