OrionX Twelfth CryptoSuper 500 Report: Bitcoin Passes the Fourth Halving

This article is not financial, investment, or legal advice. Disclosure: As of this date, author has long positions in MicroStrategy and Bitcoin ETFs but no positions in Bitcoin mining stocks.

Bitcoin is a Decentralized Special Purpose Supercomputer

Bitcoin is the world’s largest 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 a distributed ledger.

The latest Top500 list has recently 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. If assigned to SHA-256 hashing, Frontier would provide only the equivalent hash rate of about three racks 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, responsible for most of the floating point power of high-end supercomputers, are two orders of magnitude slower for the SHA-256 hashing algorithm than the 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.

Bitcoin Grows as a Power Law