Blockchain Technology to Power Next-Generation Distributed Supercomputers

The ultra-resilient bitcoin network is the world's largest distributing computing project in terms of raw computational power, having long ago surpassed 1 exaFLOPS (1,000 petaFLOPS) - over eight times the combined speed of the top 500 supercomputers. Although since increasing to an amazing 3.2 zettaFLOPS (3,200 exaFLOPS), the project was quietly removed from Wikipedia's list of distributed computing projects. This is probably due to the fact that the exaFLOPS estimate breaks down with bitcoin's specialized ASICs, since they are not capable of floating-point operations. Instead, the....

To secure the integrity of this permissioned distributed ledger, Ledger Assets make use of proof-of-stake. Blockchain technology facilitates near real-time exchange of information, assets, and any other type of data. But one Australian startup has come up with a way to make distributed ledgers even faster. Moreover, they reduce the energy costs required by a significant margin. Ledger Assets has unveiled EcoChain to the world, but is it that spectacular? Most people associate the blockchain with using tons of computational power and electricity to secure it. After all, that is how things....

It's difficult to think of the huge computing power dedicated to Bitcoin and altcoin mining, much higher than the combined computing power of the 500 most powerful supercomputers on the planet, without thinking that perhaps all that computing power should be put to good use. The Bitcoin network can be thought of a distributed supercomputer dedicated to a single computational task - maintaining the Bitcoin system itself - which is a very useful task by itself. But there are many distributed computing projects, such as Folding@home and SETI@home, dedicated to important scientific tasks,....

Is the bitcoin network the most powerful distributed computing system -- hence, the most powerful computer, period -- on Earth? Maybe, although the designation comes marked with a few asterisks. According to Bitcoin Charts, which tracks activity on the distributed global network of bitcoin mining computers, the network has achieved a hashrate (the rate at which new blocks of bitcoins are mined) of 1039.79 petaflops, or more than 1 exaflops. As The Genesis Block points out, that's more than eight times the performance level of the world's 500 most powerful supercomputers. (A few notes on....

For several years now, kindly volunteers have been contributing their spare computing power to vast, distributed supercomputers, all in the name of worthy causes. Spare computing cycles have been used for everything from scanning cosmic radio signals for signs of extraterrestrial life through to calculating climate change scenarios. Now, a new project hopes to let people charge for their spare computing cycles. Traditionally, in a community grid project, one central resource (such as SETI@Home) co-ordinates thousands of volunteer computers in a cloud, relying on people giving up their....