Thirteen years ago, Stanford researchers created a program that allowed anyone in the world to help solve diseases simply by running their computers.
Called
Folding@home, the program enables you to perform calculations on your idle computer that are needed to do research into protein folding. This research is important because when proteins mis-fold, cancer, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's can result.
So far, 6.3 million CPUs have contributed
18 petaFLOPS of computation, resulting
in 109 peer-reviewed articles describing various breakthroughs, big and small, in managing those diseases.
Bitcoin the digital currency, is
About four years old. But the amount of computing power that currently goes into
Mining Bitcoin, which are created by unscrambling complex strings of encrypted numbers,
**w stands at 110.6 petaFLOPS.
So if we apply the amount of computing power **w being devoted to
Bitcoin Mining to Folding@home,
we could **w be pumping out 666 peer-reviewed papers About chronic diseases.
There's more.
A**ther mass computing program, called
Einstein@home, is designed to detect gravitational-wave emissions from spinning neutron stars. The project seems to have gone into partial hibernation. But as of 2010, it had compiled less than a full petaFLOPS' worth of computations
to detect 2 new pulsars, which indicate the presence of neutron stars and allow astro**mers to study the behavior of matter at nuclear density.
So on our same 110.6 petaFLOPS,
we could have found at least 221 new Pulsars.
BI contributor John Aziz has discussed the moral implications of these kinds of calculations, finding them at ambiguous at best.
But it seems fair to state that if you're considering devoting resources to
Bitcoin mining, you may want to keep these numbers in mind.
SEE ALSO: Bitcoin Mining Is Becoming A Professional, Industrial, **rdic Enterprise
Join the conversation about this story »
أكثر...
Here's The Most Tragic Thing About Mining Bitcoin