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Update about.html #143

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sunnankar commented Apr 19, 2013

Update to the statistics and cleaned up the language.

For processing power comparison; added a sentence about supercomputers.

Update about.html
Update to the statistics and cleaned up the language.

For processing power comparison; added a sentence about supercomputers.

@sipa sipa commented on the diff Apr 19, 2013

en/about.html
<ul>
- <li>Long block chain (more than 220,000 blocks).</li>
- <li>A lot of processing power securing transactions - estimated at over 25 terahashes/s.</li>
- <li>Over $1 million USD of daily trade volume distributed across 40,000 transactions.</li>
- <li>Total value of all bitcoins in circulation is over $300 million.</li>
- <li>Only one major <a href="https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Incidents#Value_overflow">security incident</a> in the protocol (fixed in August 2010).</li>
+ <li>Long blockchain with more than 232,000 blocks.</li>
+ <li>The largest distributed computing network in the world with more than 65 terahashes per second and over 800 petaflops. For comparision the United States Department of Energy's Triton, the <a href="http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/12/titan-supercomputer-leads-latest-top-500-list-as-newly-available/">world's top supercomputer</a>, has approximately 18 petaflops.</li>
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sipa Apr 19, 2013

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NAK. The Bitcoin network does 0 Tflop/s. Making certain assumption about the distribution of hardware, we can estimate how much flop/s it could do, but technically it performs 0, and as processing power shifts towards FPGA and ASICs, that estimate becomes more and more meaningless (typical numbers assume it's entirely GPUs).

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sunnankar commented Apr 19, 2013

Then this sentence needs to be reworded to be more accurate since the current version states 'over 25 terahashes/s'.

What would you suggest as more accurate language for this sentence to convey the size of the network, its perceived strength and relative size?

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luke-jr commented Apr 19, 2013

Terahashes/s is a valid measurement of mining efforts, unlike FLOPs.

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saivann commented Apr 19, 2013

The terahashes/FLOPs issue was already discussed here : bitcoin#44

How about using this language :
"To do the same operation with common x86 CPUs, 728 petaFLOPS of processing power would be required."

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sunnankar commented Apr 20, 2013

We need something accurate but understandable for the average person and the main thrust should be to accomplish an understanding of the approximate size of the network and compare and contrast it with another project like Titon. Including the word terahash or petaflop is already going to lose 99% of the audience. Using x86 CPU is going to be even more confusing. Thus, would adding a few qualifying words like this make the sentence technically accurate?

"The largest distributed computing network in the world with computer processing power approximately equal to more than 65 terahashes per"

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luke-jr commented Apr 20, 2013

I don't think you can contrast them... SHA256d is not <whatever Titon is doing>.

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sunnankar commented Apr 20, 2013

The language issue was not resolved in #44. The argument against this update would logically require the current sentence to be struck.

I laid out the case for what needs to be done from a marketing perspective. Do you have any suggestions for how the sentence should be worded?

Otherwise, in the interest of accuracy we should strike the current statement and replace it with nothing but this will have a negative effect of not conveying the size of the network and perceived security.

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saivann commented Apr 20, 2013

I have nothing against saying "One of the largest distributed computing network in the world", but not the one, because we can't verify that claim. And it is true that there is no FLOPS equivalence for Terahashes/s. No matter what we do, estimations will remain questionable.

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sunnankar commented Apr 20, 2013

Yes, verification is an issue. Let's use:

"One of the largest distributed computing networks in the world"

And the specifics and comparison can be removed. We can always revisit this later if needed and consensus can be reached on how to present it.

@saivann saivann closed this in b9b16ed Apr 25, 2013

@sunnankar sunnankar deleted the unknown repository branch Apr 25, 2013

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