I notice I am confused. 60 times more than all other computers combined would imply that >98% of human compute capacity is tied up in the bitcoin network. That seems...unlikely.
The figure’s misleading, because mining (these days) is done with specialised hardware: ASICs, chips dedicated to calculating SHA256 hashes (or whatever algorithm your favourite coin uses), which can calculate those approx.105 times times faster (per second per $) than a general-purpose CPU—but can’t do anything else.
So that implication may well be true in the sense that if all the worlds computers turned to mining bitcoin, the total mining capacity would only be increased by a couple percent over what it is at the moment (due to general-purpose computers being so inefficient at specific tasks compared to dedicated hardware). But false in the sense that very little of the world’s general-purpose compute capacity is tied up mining cryptocurrency.
I notice I am confused. 60 times more than all other computers combined would imply that >98% of human compute capacity is tied up in the bitcoin network. That seems...unlikely.
The figure’s misleading, because mining (these days) is done with specialised hardware: ASICs, chips dedicated to calculating SHA256 hashes (or whatever algorithm your favourite coin uses), which can calculate those approx.105 times times faster (per second per $) than a general-purpose CPU—but can’t do anything else.
So that implication may well be true in the sense that if all the worlds computers turned to mining bitcoin, the total mining capacity would only be increased by a couple percent over what it is at the moment (due to general-purpose computers being so inefficient at specific tasks compared to dedicated hardware). But false in the sense that very little of the world’s general-purpose compute capacity is tied up mining cryptocurrency.