I don’t fully understand the ins and outs of Bitcoin. What I do just about understand (correct me if I’m wrong!) is that the amount of processing it’s worth doing per day is a product of the price, and vice versa.<\/p>\n
As Bitcoin mining is effectively an arms race to producing the most processing power per unit of electricity\/money. To do this there is now custom hardware<\/a>.\u00a0 Graphics cards and “normal” supercomputers have their theoretical power measured in FLOPS (there’s other better measures, I think FLOPS is the BMI of supercomputing). The important point here is that it stands for “Floating point operations per second”. A floating point number<\/a> is basically the same as scientific notation. A number and then the number of times to shift the decimal point left or right. Bitcoin mining uses hardware optimised specifically for integer<\/a> operations, rather than floating point.<\/p>\n Why does this matter?<\/p>\n Well, it seems reasonably likely that Bitcoin might crash and make the vast amount of bespoke hardware deployed to mine it suddenly unprofitable. The owners will have the choice of scrapping\/mothballing it or to try and monetise it in other ways which would mean a sudden glut of availability of processing power for integer tasks (unlike the more common\u00a0 FLOPS). Maybe that’s something we should be preparing for? Could it have a significant impact on commodity data processing? Maybe there’s going to be a window where\u00a0\u00a0 teams with tasks\u00a0 that can run on such hardware can get very good deals… until everyone else catches up.<\/p>\n I’m not experienced with supercomputing, so this is just a back-of-the-envelope theory.<\/p>\n Is this a realistic scenario? Have I overestimated the significance of floating point vs integer hardware?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I don’t fully understand the ins and outs of Bitcoin. What I do just about understand (correct me if I’m wrong!) is that the amount of processing it’s worth doing per day is a product of the price, and vice versa. As Bitcoin mining is effectively an arms race to producing the most processing power […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7187],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bitcoin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1782"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1782\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1785,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1782\/revisions\/1785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}