In recent months, the Aurora supercomputer in Illinois caught the eyes and attention of tech enthusiasts around the world after breaking the “exascale barrier”. Boasting its ability to process one quintillion operations per second, and its size of roughly four tennis courts combined, Aurora is making a name for itself as one of the most impressive and powerful supercomputers on the planet, with plans to map the human brain in the near future.
Now, one quintillion operations per second does sound like a lot – but have these reporters ever heard of bitcoin?
Visualizing The Bitcoin Hashrate
Centralizing your data processing to a singular location limits your computer’s full potential, but that relative size could also make it seem larger and more powerful than its actual scale of impact on the world.
Who have you ever heard talking about the Illinois Aurora supercomputer that made their lives so much easier?
On the other hand, when you decentralize these data facilities around the world, but combine their efforts to support a singular protocol, you end up with a global force that can make an impact on more people’s lives.
That’s exactly what the Bitcoin network is doing with its decentralized mining infrastructure.
Compared to Aurora’s one quintillion operations per second, Bitcoin miners process more than 650 exahashes – or 650 quintillion hashes – per second.
Quintillions = 10^18. 650,000,000,000,000,000,000 hashes per second.
And as mentioned, Aurora’s computer is the size of four tennis courts combined, as opposed to the laptop that sits on your desk, or your hard drive tucked underneath. That’s a pretty big computer.
But relative to Aurora, if we were to consolidate all of the Bitcoin mining facilities around the world into one location, we’d need more than 2,600 tennis courts of surface area.
What would a Bitcoin superminer conglomerate of that scale look like compared to Aurora?
Imagine a computer about ~12% larger than the largest parking lot in the world at the West Edmenton Mall in Alberta, Canada.
If tennis courts and parking lots don’t help, consider the difference vertically.
If we were to assume that the Bitcoin hashrate was an object the size of the world’s largest building, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, towering at 0.51 miles in the air, then the Aurora supercomputer would be about the height of a standing desk inside the lobby – just over 4 feet tall.
You wouldn’t even be able to see the desk in a visual comparing the two.
The Bitcoin mining network is very, very powerful. Entirely unstoppable, unless an asteroid impact or some other extinction-level event wiped humanity and its inventions off the face of the planet. Realistically, generating enough computing power to override Bitcoin miners and change the rules of the protocol would require a global collaborative effort among superpowers to conduct a hostile takeover of all the computers on earth – an effort far more expensive, destructive, and less productive than simply adapting to the rules of the network..
While obviously the goals of each computing network are quite different, it’s clear that bitcoin’s is the most powerful to exist, and probably the most powerful to ever exist long into the future.
Visualize Bitcoin Nodes
Have you ever seen a map of bitcoin’s node distribution?
You’ll want to bookmark bitnodes.io if you haven’t already. And refer to mempool.space for a map of Lightning node distribution.
As of July 2024, there are 19,381 active Bitcoin nodes, present in 91 different countries and every continent besides Antarctica. (Who’s going to be the first to set one up?)
The United States and Germany, interestingly enough considering its government just sold off its entire Bitcoin stack, make up the largest percentage of nodes. Despite the attacks on Bitcoin each of these country’s respective governments have made, the people have made it clear that bitcoin won’t be leaving their countries anytime soon.
Furthermore, nearly 64% of nodes are running over the Tor network, so trying to trace nodes back to their origin IP address is a futile effort.
If you want to enhance your Bitcoin privacy, utilizing Tor is a very good idea. Learn why.
Visualize Bitcoin Holders
More important than any other metric shared here is the number of users actually incorporating bitcoin into their lives. Whether that be as a passive savings vehicle or as an active payment channel for small business, nothing else works in bitcoin if people aren’t using it.
Now first off, let’s set the record straight: It is impossible to know the exact number of unique Bitcoin holders in the world. There are simply too many unknowns, such as determining how many wallet addresses each person owns, which addresses represent full companies or government bodies rather than individuals, etc. With uncertainties like these, the best we can do is estimate how many individuals own bitcoin.
Based on current estimates based on a collection of different data points, there are more than 106 million Bitcoin holders worldwide, making up 1.3% of the Earth’s population. And with each passing cycle, this number only continues to grow. Let’s call it 100 million for the sake of simplicity.
1.3% may not sound like that many people. Relative to the world population, it’s true that it isn’t. But have you ever seen a crowd of 100 million people before?
Consider the highest-attended sports event in history: The World Cup Final of 1950 – Brazil vs. Uruguay. *Only* 199,854 in attendance at the Maracaña Stadium:
Not even 0.2% of the Bitcoin network’s user base. If you wanted to fit 106 million people into an appropriately sized stadium, it would have to be as large as the city of San Francisco, or twice the size of Manhattan.
Or, consider in 2019, when India hosted its famous Kumbh Mela, which hosted 50 million people in one day, the highest-attended human gathering in recorded history.
At least for me, trying to visualize at this scale simply breaks my brain. All of the lights you see illuminate the streets below to accommodate the millions of people packed in for the event.
There just aren’t any images that encapsulate what all 50 million, let alone 100 million people, looks like.
Now what if bitcoin’s estimated 100 million owners were a country of their own?
Consider the top 15 countries with the largest populations:
- China: 1,420,000,000
- India: 1,410,000,000
- United States: 334,000,000
- Indonesia: 278,000,000
- Pakistan: 236,000,000
- Nigeria: 223,000,000
- Brazil: 216,000,000
- Bangladesh: 172,000,000
- Russia: 145,000,000
- Mexico: 129,000,000
- Japan: 125,000,000
- Ethiopia: 121,000,000
- Philippines: 118,000,000
- Egypt: 109,000,000
- Vietnam: 98,000,000
With ~100 million owners, the Bitcoin network would currently be the 15th largest country in the world, knocking Vietnam down to the 16th spot.
If we were to scale things up from the nation state level to the planetary level: Assuming a ~1.3% global adoption rate, the Bitcoin network would be ever so slightly larger than planet Earth relative to the Sun if we were to scale things up.
It’s interesting to note that despite Bitcoin owners making up a tiny relative size compared to the whole of the Earth’s population, hashpower tells a completely opposite story. The decentralized hashpower generated to protect this small sliver of humanity’s wealth is already 650x more powerful than our most impressive centralized supercomputers.
All this means is that there’s still plenty of room for growth. In both users and hashrate. Despite the unimaginably large hashpower numbers that Bitcoin already puts up, they too will grow larger and larger – into figures that we can’t even pronounce.
No Such Thing As A Rich, Low-Energy Country
If bitcoin’s shockingly high energy usage is of concern to you, understand that there is no such thing as a rich, low-energy country. If a nation is to acquire resources and generate wealth for its citizens, it must equally consume a higher amount of energetic resources to support economic growth.
Burn this image into your mind, put together by user Thomasjam from data based on Wikipedia’s Social Progress Index.
The most affluent nations on Earth consume the most energy on the planet.
What’s more important than our carbon footprint is how efficiently we use our energy. And as explained by many bitcoiners, our money is the purest form of energy that we have. If we’re trying to enrich the world while simultaneously using money that is designed to leak energy over time, we’re losing efficiency at the very foundation of the economic engine we’re trying to build for the world.
In terms of ROI for making progress towards a cleaner planet, we need to be pushing for bitcoin’s growth so it can more effectively reallocate energy that’s currently being spent on outdated infrastructure upholding a flawed monetary system.
What Is Bitcoin Capable Of?
What does the world look like when the entire population is using bitcoin as the de facto settlement layer for all of its transactions?
- Property rights for the world: What was once a novel framework that led to the United States’ greatest burst of wealth creation in history is now possible worldwide with bitcoin. As long as you have some form of compatible device to store bitcoin, and even without an internet connection, you can have property of your own that isn’t subject to debasement or other forms of manipulation.
- Global abundance: This breakthrough in property distribution is one of the key stepping stones needed to create global wealth and abundance, that previously only a handful of countries enjoyed.
- Financial freedom: There are no wait times, account holds, or processing periods on a Bitcoin standard. Transactions settle instantly and immediately reflect in each holder’s wallets, as if a hand-to-hand cash transaction took place. Not only does this create financial independence for billions of people, but also for the millions of businesses that currently have to account for time-incurred costs of holding cash for too long.
- Reestablished trust: Ironically, relying on a trustless system for economic exchange results in greater trust between parties. Requiring trust in any exchange inherently exposes the exchange to risk – risk that either party can (and does) take advantage of. Instead, having each party mutually rely on the same trustless network for payments enables both instant settlement and 100% transparency, both of which instill trust between parties.
Final Thoughts
Despite bitcoin’s nascency, the network has already grown to become a powerful and unstoppable global force. If you think that hash power generated from a computer the size of 2,600 tennis courts is impressive, just wait until full-scale hyperbitcoinization. The world on a Bitcoin standard will be nearly unrecognizable from our world today; just as unrecognizable as how we look back on life prior to the advent of free information and technological dominance.
Of course, as Bitcoin adoption grows, so too will the savings you have stored in it. Be sure that you’re being mindful of what you hold, and protect your growing wealth with all of the various tools that bitcoiners have created over the years.
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