SR039: Twelfth CryptoSuper500 List – Slides

Twelfth CryptoSuper 500 List – Slides

This our Twelfth semiannual report on the global Cryptocurrency mining industry. Bitcoin has emerged as the world’s largest, albeit special purpose, supercomputer. And it is globally decentralized. Millions of nodes all run the same open-source code to secure the Bitcoin network, create value, and put new transactions onto the distributed ledger. The latest Top500 list has just been announced at the ISC 2024 conference in Hamburg, and once again the Frontier supercomputer with 1.2 Exaflops peak performance is number one on the list.

Specialization is a current topic in future supercomputers and some lessons can be learned from Bitcoin. If assigned to SHA-256 hashing, Frontier would provide only the equivalent hash rate of about three cabinets of the latest high-end Bitcoin mining systems, costing less than 0.1% of Frontier’s cost. Michael Saylor, Chairman of MicroStrategy, has pointed out that GPUs are two orders of magnitude slower than the 5-nanometer technology of custom ASICs used for Bitcoin mining today. He makes the point that the Bitcoin network is unassailable by all of the hyperscale computing resources combined in AWS, Google, and Microsoft Azure cloud data centers today.